Wall St climbs ahead of Amazon, Alphabet earnings; stimulus in focus
- by Nick Cohen
- in Industry
- — Feb 4, 2021
It booked $56.9bn in revenue in the fourth quarter, leading full-year revenues to top $182.5bn, and it ended the year with $41.2bn in operating income. For the first time ever, Alphabet released information related to its cloud unit; for the quarter that business took in $3.8 billion in revenue while reporting a loss of $1.2 billion. That was a achieve of 31.7% from the $43.2 billion that Alphabet grossed throughout final 12 months's fourth quarter.
Both companies exceeded analyst projections for revenue and earnings by a sizable amount, and Amazon posted its first quarter with revenue of more than $100 billion.
Advertising revenue in the quarter rose 22% to $46.2 billion. Analysts were expecting the company to report a profit of $11.9 billion.
Advertising revenue in Q4 came out to $46.2 billion, up 22 per cent from $37.93 billion in the same quarter a year ago.
Philipp Schindler, Google's chief business officer, said in a call: "YouTube continues, in our view, to be incredible for brand advertisers".
Google's advertising business contributed $46.2 billion in revenues in the quarter, spread out across Google Search ($32 billion), YouTube ads ($6.9 billion), and other advertising.
Looking on the backside line for the fourth quarter, Alphabet made $15.23 billion through the 2020 interval in comparison with the $10.67 billion the corporate earned in 2019's This fall. That resulted in a 42.7% gain in earnings. At the start of the fourth quarter, Alphabet had a cash position of $20.1 billion.
For the year, Cloud segments brought in $13.06 billion in revenue and reported an operating loss of $5.6 billion. Still, it could seem that cash appears to vanish within the cloud.
Alphabet shares shot up more than 6% after the bell following its earnings report. Analysts expected Google to benefit from increased online search activity and YouTube viewership while people remained stuck at home.
Despite its size and history of outsized growth, Alphabet (Google) was one of the hardest hit during the height of the pandemic.
It was also during this period that Alphabet revealed something that hadn't happened in its entire corporate history.
