Google does not know the crisis. The American firm can count on its advertising revenue to reap even more profits. The group’s profits have almost doubled in 2021.
Despite increasing pressure from regulators, Google continues to reach new heights. Its parent company, Alphabet, has indeed announced a net profit of 76 billion dollars for the year 2021, almost double that of 2020 (40 billion). Last year, the American giant saw its sales increase by 41% to reach 257.6 billion dollars over one year.
Unsurprisingly, these good results are to be credited to advertising, the growth engine par excellence of the Mountain View firm. This vital segment for the financial health of Google continues to represent more than 80% of the group’s revenues. And if the online advertising sector was slightly shaken at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, it quickly recovered thanks to teleworking and e-commerce which prompted brands to invest massively in the search engine. , in order to capture consumers who have adopted more digital habits than ever during the health crisis.
Google Cloud is progressing but remains in deficit
That shows in Google’s performance in the final quarter of 2021: 61.2 of the company’s $75.3 billion in revenue came from advertising revenue, up 33% over the period. At the same time, the American group made 20.6 billion in profits. The Sundar Pichai-led company is likely to continue to benefit from this financial windfall in 2022, as eMarketer estimates that digital advertising should allow Google to capture more than $ 171 billion in revenue this year. , or 30% of the global market, ahead of Facebook (23.7%), the other juggernaut in the sector.
In addition, the YouTube division brought in $8.6 billion to Google in the last quarter of 2021, while the cloud branch grew by 45% to reach $5.5 billion in revenue over the period. The “cloud” is one of the major areas on which the American giant is focusing its efforts. However, it requires heavy investment to keep up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. While Google Cloud’s revenue grew 47% to $19.2 billion in 2021, the division remains heavily loss-making with a loss of $3.1 billion in the past year, including $890 million during the last quarter. But the game is worth the candle in the eyes of Google, which has made the cloud a priority so that it becomes a growth driver for advertising in the next few years.