Porat pointed out that a focus on the developing of self-driving technology will be hugely important for the business in months and years to come.
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Continuing on to Amazon, Munster believes the company is only “strengthening its death grip on traditional retail”, and is impressed by continued push to open more fulfillment centers (18 to be opened this year versus only six the previous year).
Analysts polled by FactSet had expected the company to report earnings of $8.04 a share on sales of $16.9 billion.
Alphabet is now doing, it seems, exactly what it wants to be doing.
Despite the strong revenue growth, the falling cost-per-click on advertisements is cause for concern, said analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy.
“The strength of the quarter is about mobile”, Google CEO Sundar Picahi said.
Moreover, Alphabet’s non-advertising revenue increase was even higher at 33%, propelled by cloud storage, hardware sales, and Play Store revenues.
Amazon posted earnings of $1.78 per share, toppling expectations of $1.11 per share on revenue of $30.4 billion, above estimates of $29.55 billion. Alphabet was created in part to create more transparency for investors seeking to differentiate between the company’s lucrative core businesses and its moonshots.
Shares in Alphabet reached all-time highs of US$802 per share.
Pichai also hinted at the future direction for Google, saying that while today, “mobile is the engine that drives us”, the company is looking to machine learning for future growth. Alphabet’s lucrative advertising business reported $7 billion in profits on $21 billion in revenue; its “Other Bets” division, however, is still losing money, even as its revenue grows.
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From the Alphabet’s standpoint, the other business it has under its wings, including Google Fiber (broadband), Nest (home automation products), self-driven cars, and X- a research facility, is yet to pick up on a bigger scale.
