Plans to split its stock this summer
While some product categories might be facing a slowdown in the everlasting wake of the pandemic, Google continues to dominate the tech landscape. With the internet dominating more of our lives than ever before, the company managed to crush previous records, even on the heels of a massive year.
Alphabet reported $257 billion in overall revenue for 2021 — a 41% increase from 2020 — with Q4 delivering $75.3 billion to that total. That’s a 32 percent jump from Q4 2020, proving the company has plenty of room to keep improving year-over-year. Its net profit also showed improvement after two similar quarters, ballooning to $20.6 billion.
As always, ads were the big moneymaker for Alphabet, bringing in $43.3 billion through Google’s search engine alone. YouTube ads also came in hot, with $8.6 billion generated through the world’s most popular video site. Of course, the real attention is on cloud services. An ever-growing sector for the company, Google Cloud reported $5.6 billion in revenue. It still wasn’t enough to turn a profit, though, as the division reported $890 million in losses.
Google’s not one to break out categories like hardware into specific numbers, instead choosing to lump them into a generic “Services” category within its earnings. Still, it’s hard to ignore the improved success of the Pixel series. Sundar Pichai declared Q4 2021 an “all-time quarterly sales record” for its smartphones. The Google Services category includes plenty of other products, including Android, Google Play, and YouTube’s non-ads sectors. Still, despite this, it’s hard not to notice the jump in revenue: up to nearly $70 billion in Q4 vs. $52.8 billion this time last year.
It seems warnings in October that Q4 could see slowed growth in the face of increased marketing costs were, ultimately, overblown. It’ll be interesting to see where Alphabet grows from here. In its earnings call, the company stressed its move into TV, seeing it as primetime for targeted advertisements. With a low-cost Chromecast reportedly on the horizon, it seems like a serious bet for Google. It also doubled down on India as a massive part of its plan for continued growth, citing confidence in the country’s digital economy.
As part of today’s earnings report, Alphabet also announced a 20:1 stock split planned for July. It’ll make its stock affordable to retail investors for the first time in years, preventing potential buyers from paying nearly $3,000 for a single share. Alphabet’s stock was up 8% in after-hours trading.
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