Google has just announced their Q4 results for 2013, and after the announcement yesterday of the sale of Motorola to Lenovo, the focus is on the losses that Motorola has continued to accrue despite having a pair of great smartphones released.
Larry Page, CEO of Google said
We ended 2013 with another great quarter of momentum and growth. Google’s standalone revenue was up 22% year on year, at $15.7 billion. We made great progress across a wide range of product improvements and business goals. I’m also very excited about improving people’s lives even more with continued hard work on our user experiences.
The expectations from Wall Street was that Google was supposed to be posting $16.75 billion in revenue with earnings of $12.26 a share, unfortunately Google missed this, delivering 13.6 billion in revenue and $12.01 a share. So, the high points :
- $16.86 billion consolidated revenue for Q3, up 17% on Q3 2012.
- 3.38 billion net income, up from 2.89 billion on Q4 2012.
- $58.72 billion cash on hand as of December 31st 2013, up from $56.52 billion reported in Q3 2013.
- 47,756 full-time employees (43,862 in Google and 3,894 in Motorola Mobile).
- Motorola Mobile had an operating loss in Q4 2013 of $384 million.
The Google share price closed at US $1,135.39 but climbed slightly in after hours trading to US $1,145.00 up 0.85%.
The actual earnings call has yet to start and Larry Page usually has some extra comments which are quite interesting that he posts on his Google+ page looks like Larry won’t be on this call, instead Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer is running the show today.
Update:
Patrick Pichette has advised that content and App Sales from Google Play contributed to revenue growth. It seems like the Nexus devices were a good bet, with Pichette advising that ‘Play hardware sales also drove a big chunk of quarter-over-quarter growth’.
Interesting tidbit – April 8th, Google will begin selling Class C shares under the GOOG share name, while the Class A shares will be listed under the new label GOOGL
