Google’s parent company Alphabet was able to shine with great quarterly figures this week. The $200 billion mark in sales was broken for the first time. Meta, on the other hand, experienced the biggest daily loss ever suffered by an American company. So in today’s winners and losers issue, representatives of “Big Tech” face off.
But before we turn to Alphabet and Meta, here’s an overview of some of the most important NextPit headlines from the past week:
Winner of the week: Alphabet
A, B, C
Easy as 1, 2, 3…
Alphabet, the owner of Google, reported a 41% jump in sales and $257 billion in profit for 2021. According to its latest annual report, the company generated $75.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, up 32% from the same period last year.
This means that in October, November, and December of 2021 alone, Alphabet earned the same amount as it did in the 12 months of 2015, when annual revenues were $75 billion.
In 2015, when Alphabet was founded, the company had annual sales of $75 billion / © Google
According to Alphabet (and Google) CEO Sundar Pichai, this strong fourth-quarter growth was directly impacted by the company’s advertising business and a record quarter of Pixel phone sales and cloud services.
Revisiting Pichai’s statement, at least two things stand out: pixels and advertising. Over the past year, Google has invested in advertising for the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro like never before. So it’s no surprise to hear that the Pixel series has broken sales records. However, since Big G doesn’t share the number of units sold, we don’t really know how big the success of the new models in the series is.
As for advertising, Google’s revenue for the quarter was $61.24 billion. This suggests that unlike companies like Meta, Twitter and Snapchat, Google was less affected by the changes Apple made last year when it introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) with iOS 14.5.
To recap what it’s all about, this new privacy setting gives iPhones more control over which services use user data for targeted advertising purposes. With Google having its own solution for collecting data about its search service and/or YouTube, for example, the company seems to have taken a clear advantage in 2021, ending the year with an impressive $257 billion in revenue.
Alphabet shareholders should be really happy about that. What Facebook Meta, on the other hand, affects…
Loser of the week: Meta
It is no secret that the social network Facebook is losing ground to platforms like TikTok, especially among younger users. However, after Meta announced the decline in daily active Facebook users for the first time, the stock market rattled!
Meta’s share price plummeted on Thursday, and as a result, the company lost $230 billion in value right after the market closed. According to data from The Verge it was the largest loss ever suffered by an American company in a single day.
Meta this week suffered its largest single-day loss ever suffered by an American company / © Shutterstock/rafapress
One thing is that Meta is far from understanding what young people want to see on a social network. Also, the impact of Apple’s new privacy policy was more profound for Meta than for Google. In fact, the company will continue to suffer revenue losses due to the iOS ATT, which the company’s chief financial officer says is approximately $10 billion.
And of course, that record drop was enough to put the loser hat on Meta this week. Having said that, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is still valued at around $671 billion and reported profits of over $40 billion in 2021. I am now curious to see what the sales figures for the first quarter of 2022 will be. How about you?
And with that thought I end my Sunday column. But before I say goodbye, let me remind you that Samsung is hosting an Unpacked event on Wednesday. So keep an eye on the NextPit coverage for the Galaxy S22 series!
And as always, the question for you: Can you understand why we chose Alphabet and Meta this week, or were there other companies that you would have chosen as winners or losers? Tell us in the comments!