During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $9.36 EPS.
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Google’s revenue grew 26 percent in the first quarter from the quarter a year earlier to total $31.1 billion, according to the company. It accounts for almost all of the company’s top line, as it reached 24% to $26.6 billion.
Pichai allegedly received the shares before his promotion to senior vice president of products a year earlier, when he took over many of co-founder Larry Page’s responsibilities.
Also on the call, Porat addressed Google’s $2.5 billion purchase of Chelsea Market in downtown Manhattan.
Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said the results reflected “momentum globally”.
The new rule comes in the wake of a data breach at Facebook.
Previous heavy investment periods mostly supported Google businesses like Search and YouTube that had leading market positions.
Alphabet shares jumped nearly 1% in after-hours trading before slipping back.
Last year, for the first time, Google spent more than any corporation on federal lobbying, which was also a first for any Silicon Valley company.
Investors are uncertain about future profit at Alphabet as the company navigates the move to a phone-based computing world and invests in small, fast-growing initiatives from self-driving cars to selling hardware and cloud computing services. Just in the last few months, we have seen some fantastic applications from dairy farmers in Georgia using TensorFlow to improve the health their herds to our own Google researchers who figured out how to use ML techniques to assess a person’s risk of a heart attack. Goldman Sachs’ managing director Heather Bellini asked how GPDR would impact Google’s advertising business.
The strong results came despite fears that rising costs and regulation could undermine the search giant’s performance.
Google’s parent company Alphabet has notched up another quarter (PDF) of swollen sales for Q1 2018, revealing the outcome of investments like its stake in Uber. Larry Page, CEO of California-based U.S. multinational conglomerate Alphabet, said, “Sundar has been doing a great job as Google’s CEO, driving strong growth, partnerships, and tremendous product innovation”.
Backlash over Facebook’s “breach of trust” regarding Cambridge Analytica could spark US regulation that would crimp political ad spending on Google properties including YouTube.
Some analysts believe it could prompt some users to reject receiving personalised ads online, hitting Google’s sales. “This has been a very strong area, and we will continue to do a lot of work in this area”.
In related news, CEO Sundar Pichai sold 4,000 shares of Alphabet stock in a transaction dated Friday, February 9th.
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Alphabet invests in privately held companies through a variety of entities, including GV and Google, as well as CapitalG, a private equity fund, and Gradient Ventures, a VC fund focused on artificial intelligence, as well as strategic investments made out of its corporate arm and individual business units. Google payouts to distribution partners, known as Traffic Acquisition Costs, or TAC, jumped 36 percent to $6.3 billion.
