NEW DELHI: Google’s parent company Alphabet reported $56.9 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, beating Wall Street forecasts on the back of a solid recovery in its core search advertising business.
Gross revenue grew 23 per cent year-on-year, from $46 billion in Q4 2019, with operating income at $15.65 billion and net income at $15.2 billion for this quarter.
Advertising revenue in Q4 came out to $46.2 billion, up 22 per cent from $37.93 billion in the same quarter last year. That’s a sharp turnaround from Q2, when the onset of the Covid2019 pandemic spurred advertisers to pull back on spending, causing an 8 per cent drop in ad revenue and Google’s first ever year-on-year revenue decline.
YouTube ads, which brought in $6.89 billion in Q4, showed a 46 per cent jump from the corresponding quarter last year when it earned $4.72 billion. It also saw a spike in viewers and longer time spent watching videos.
“Our direct-response business on YouTube was practically non-existent three years ago. Now, it’s one of our largest and fastest-growing ad offerings on YouTube,” said Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler.
The search giant said the cloud-computing business lost $1.24 billion in the December quarter and $5.6 billion overall in 2020. “Google other revenues” — which includes hardware, Play Store, and non-advertising YouTube revenues — reported $6.67 billion, compared to $5.26 billion the same quarter last year.
The closely-watched Other Bets segment showed operating loss of $4.48 billion in 2020. It reported $196 million revenue, primarily generated by Verily and Fiber, up from $178 million in the last quarter.
Google’s Cloud revenue soared 47 per cent to $3.83 billion, coming off of several billion dollar deals in 2020.
“Our strong results this quarter reflect the helpfulness of our products and services to people and businesses, as well as the accelerating transition to online services and the cloud. Google succeeds when we help our customers and partners succeed, and we see significant opportunities to forge meaningful partnerships as businesses increasingly look to a digital future,” said Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
