Alphabet Quarterly Results Underwhelm Investors

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Alphabet—Google’s parent company—delivered net income of $6.66 billion on revenues of $36.3 billion for the quarter ending March 31. But the results were underwhelming to investors, and they were further burdened by an EU antitrust fine of almost $1.7 billion.
“We delivered robust growth led by mobile search, YouTube, and Cloud, with Alphabet revenues of $36.3 billion, up 17 percent versus last year,” Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said. “We remain focused on, and excited by, the significant growth opportunities across our businesses.”
The issue for Alphabet, of course, is that its non-Google businesses are just that: Opportunities. And all of them continue losing money: Alphabet reported that its “other bets” delivered a quarterly operating loss of $868 million on revenues of just $170 million.
Google, of course, is going strong: Its advertising business generated $30.7 billion in revenues in the quarter, up from $26.6 billion a year ago. Advertising accounted for 84.5 percent of Google’s revenues. A year ago, it was 85.5 percent. Google is the world’s biggest seller of online ads and it accounts for one of every three ads viewed online.
And while it isn’t a big business for Google, the firm did mention that its smartphone operations encountered “year over year headwinds,” meaning that it sold fewer handsets than it had in the year-ago quarter. The firm expressed hope that future innovations, like 5G and folding handsets, would jumpstart sales in the future. And it pointed to the success of Google Assistant-enabled smart home devices.
“We see strong momentum,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.