Alphabet, the parent company of Internet giant Google, surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company Monday, when investors snapped up stock after the company reported fourth-quarter earnings of almost $5 billion. “It demonstrates that the value of YouTube can continue to be extracted”, he said. Apple registered an operating profit margin of 32 percent in its most recent quarter. Alphabet labels that category “other bets”.
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Alphabet subsidiaries include Google, Nest Labs, and Google X labs devoted to big-vision new technologies such as self-driving cars, along with such projects as smart “Google Glass” spectacles, drones, health care and Google TV – none of which has become a major source of income. It has not made any projections about if or when those bets cumulatively would become profitable. For the full year, Alphabet’s other companies lost $3.6 billion on revenue of $448 million. This year the company is predicted to capture more than 30% of the mobile advertising market putting it well ahead of Facebook in this respect on 20%.
Kelly at Recon Capital said he would not be surprised if YouTube saw a surge in advertising revenues beyond the 17 per cent increase it saw during the 2015 fiscal year.
The Google unit houses its Internet and related businesses such as search, ads, maps, YouTube and Android as well as hardware products such as its low-priced Chromebook laptops.
Advertising is a broad area and there are a lot of things that encompass it but it is significant that both Porat and Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai called out YouTube during the earnings conference.
He also touted the company’s performance during the holiday shopping season, saying that programmatic video impressions doubled this season compared to last, and that 60 per cent of them came from mobile devices.
Google’s shares rose nearly 5 per cent in after-hours trading.
Alphabet Inc. began the Wall Street trading day with a valuation of $551 billion before its stock fell 1 percent to push its value to $531 billion, pushed by a four percent gain in Google stock in after-hours trading Monday.
The company is in no hurry to figure out if these experimental projects are viable, with advertising revenue coming in at $19 billion Dollars a quarter, Google has money to blow on figuring out the future of the technology industry.
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Alphabet’s earnings per share grew 28.3% from Q4 2014 to $8.67. By contrast, clicking on a Google ad will always be free.
