Alphabet’s Q1 brought down by EC fine

If you were hoping Google would divulge its cloud revenue you’ll just have to wait for a more “appropriate time.” On a call with analysts following its Q1 earnings report on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded with a heavy-worded non-answer when asked when the company would be ready to share its numbers around its cloud revenue run rate.

“I think we are building a strong business across all our verticals, and we’re definitely are seeing a strong momentum and look forward to being able to share more at the appropriate time,” Pichai said.

As for the first quarter numbers, Google parent company Alphabet delivered mixed first quarter financial results due in part to the recent $1.7 billion antitrust fine by the European Commission that hurt its bottom line. When factoring in the fine, Alphabet Q1 earnings came to $9.50 per diluted share on revenue of $36.34 billion, up 17%. Excluding the EC fine, Alphabet said earnings were $11.90 per share. 

On average, Wall Street was looking for earnings of $10.58 per share on revenue of $37.34 billion.

Net revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (TAC) was expected to be at $30.06 billion. Alphabet delivered slightly below target with $29.45 billion in revenue excluding TAC. Traffic acquisition costs accounted for 22 percent of Google ad revenues.

“We delivered robust growth led by mobile search, YouTube, and Cloud with Alphabet revenues of $36.3 billion, up 17% versus last year, or 19% on a constant currency basis,” said Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet and Google, in a statement. “We remain focused on, and excited by, the significant growth opportunities across our businesses.”

Google revenues attributed most of Q1 sales with $25.682 billion in revenue. Google’s Other revenues — which include the company’s enterprise cloud, software, and data management products — were $5.45 billion.

On the conference call with analysts, Porat said Google revenues were driven by mobile search along with contributions from YouTube followed by cloud. The Other segment was driven by Google Cloud and Play but brought down slightly by hardware. 

“Google Cloud Platform remains one of the fastest growing businesses in Alphabet with strong customer momentum reflected in particular in demand for our compute and data analytics products,” Porat said. 

Revenue was up year-over-year in Alphabet’s “moonshot” Other Bets category, which includes Waymo, Fiber, Verily, and Alphabet’s other healthcare-driven initiatives. Its revenue in Q1 came in at $170 million with operating losses increasing to $868 million.

Google’s cost-per-click, which is how much it makes off each advertising click, decreased 19% year over year and increased 5% quarter over quarter. The company’s total advertising revenue was $30.72 billion.

Article source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/alphabets-q1-brought-down-by-ec-fine/#ftag=RSSbaffb68