★ Alphabet Announces Strong Growth, Beats on Earnings in Q2 Results (Jul 24, 2017)
Alphabet announced its Q2 2017 earnings this afternoon, and beat analysts’ estimates of revenue and earnings pretty handily, yet its stock still fell 3% in the first couple of hours afterwards, presumably because the stock has been bid up so much in recent weeks and there’s some profit taking going on. The results were pretty strong across the board, with no area of performance looking weak. The core Google business continues to grow rapidly, with the same three drivers – mobile, YouTube, and programmatic – cited once again, suggesting there’s still been no material longer term fallout at Google from the boycott against it earlier this year or the programmatic cutbacks that have followed. It’s clear that Google is investing heavily in its cloud infrastructure and personnel – CFO Ruth Porat said on the call that many of the 1600 new hires this quarter were once again directed at that part of its business. That business is still frustratingly buried in the broader Google “Other” segment along with disparate bits and pieces like Google Play and hardware revenues, so it’s impossible to parse precisely, but it’s likely that the growth of cloud services is a big contributor to overall growth in that segment. But hardware was also called out, though only Google Home and Google WiFi were called out specifically, suggesting Pixel sales are no longer such a big driver. My own recent surveys suggest Google Home in particular is selling well, taking about half the share that Amazon Echo does, with almost no other competitors in the market. The Other Bets continue to shrink their still massive losses, mostly by growing revenue faster, though the company has also reduced its capital expenditures significantly since the Google Fiber retrenchment began in late October last year. Alphabet did account for the EU fine, which it has not yet decided to pay, in its financials, but also provided a version of its profit figures which was more easily comparable with last year’s, and those showed strong growth in both revenues and profits. At this point, it’s hard to see a near-term reason for bearishness about Google or the broader Alphabet business – it now has several separate lines running well and throwing off decent profits, while it’s investing in others that should drive both in future. The one other thing worth noting, though, is that traffic acquisition costs for Google’s own sites continue to rise rapidly, with the rise driven by the payouts Google has to make to mobile vendors who send traffic its way, including Apple, Samsung, and to a lesser extent other Android vendors. That certainly doesn’t seem to be affecting profits yet, but it’s a sign of the increasing share of revenue Google is having to pay out to companies that control much of the traffic that comes its way on mobile.
via Alphabet
The company, topic, and narrative tags below will take you to other posts with the same tags. The narrative link(s) will also take you to the narrative essay which provides additional context behind the post.
Vote for or share this post
Use the Like button below to vote for this post as one of the most important of the week. The posts voted most important are more likely to be included in the News Roundup podcast episode I do each week. Or use the sharing buttons to share a link to this post to social networks or other services.