Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has today released their Q4 earnings report for 2016 and it’s a positive one with over $26 billion in revenue, a 22% increase year-over-year on 2015.
As expected, a large part of Google’s revenue – $22.4 billion of it in fact – came from advertising placed in search and YouTube. Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet said of the results:
Our growth in the fourth quarter was exceptional — with revenues up 22% year on year and 24% on a constant currency basis. This performance was led by mobile search and YouTube. We’re seeing great momentum in Google’s newer investment areas and ongoing strong progress in Other Bets.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke about three growth areas for the company which include YouTube with their ‘Red’ subscription service and YouTube Original series, they’ll be doing more in these areas in 2017. GSuite was another star, which has been bolstered by their efforts in machine learning, so expect more on that in the future.
The last, which is more important to us was hardware which Pichai said was popular with consumers. Mr Pichai said:
We introduced a new family of beautiful hardware devices in October that are made by Google. Led by Google Home and our Pixel phone, which feature the Google Assistant built-in.
We are thrilled with the reception, as were the really happy customers we saw over the holiday season. In particular Google Home was a very popular present that many people opened on Christmas morning.
We are committed to this for the long term, as a great way to bring a beautiful, seamless Google experience to people. The early signs are promising and you can expect to see us expand our offerings thoughtfully.
Some interesting numbers for Google include
- Google currently has $86 billion on hand in cash and cash equivalents including marketable securities.
- Alphabet increased their staffing levels with the headcount rising from 69,953 staff members in Q3 to 72,053 staff in Q4.
Alphabets earnings call is currently available on YouTube if you’re interested in learning more:
Love being a Google shareholder.