Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2021 on Tuesday.
They are better than expected, thanks to the general strength of advertisers’ spending and the strong online activity of consumers.
The company also reported substantial revenue growth from Google Cloud.
Advertising and the growing cloud
Google advertising generated $61.24 billion in revenue, up 33% from the same period in 2020. And while Google’s advertising business continues to subsidize its expansion into the cloud, Google Cloud’s revenue grew 45% year-over-year.
Alphabet’s total revenue this quarter was $75.33 billion, up 32% year-on-year. The company reported overall net income of $20.64 billion, or earnings per share of $30.69, while forecasts estimated earnings of $27.32 per share on revenue of $72.13 billion. dollars.
“Our deep investment in artificial intelligence technologies continues to drive extraordinary and useful experiences for people and businesses, across our most important products,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, in a statement.
“The fourth quarter saw continued strong growth in our advertising business, which helped millions of businesses thrive and find new customers, record quarterly sales for our Pixel phones despite supply constraints, and our cloud business which continues to grow strongly. »
$69.4 billion for Google Services
Google Services, which includes Google advertising, brought in $69.4 billion in revenue. Within Google Services, revenue from Google Search and other ads (excluding YouTube ad sales) was $43.3 billion. YouTube ad revenue increased to $8.63 billion.
Google Services presents an operating result of 25.99 billion dollars. Google Cloud recorded an operating loss of $890 million. It is nevertheless lower than in the fourth quarter of 2020, when the operating loss amounted to 1.24 billion dollars.
For the full year of 2021, Google Cloud saw more than 80% growth in total transaction volume for Google Cloud Platform, the CEO said in a conference call Tuesday. It has seen more than 65% growth in the number of transactions over $1 billion.
As for the business sector named “other bets” of Alphabet, its quarterly turnover amounted to 181 million dollars, representing an operating loss of 1.45 billion dollars.
Alphabet also reported an operating loss of $1.768 billion from unallocated business costs, which primarily include corporate initiatives, company-shared costs, such as finance and legal, including certain fines and regulations, and costs associated with certain shared R&D activities.
Source: ZDNet.com