For a while, Google and Apple have been battling it out to be the most valuable company in the world, after they both dethroned Exxon a few years ago. Now that Alphabet has been formed and is Google’s parent company, and earnings day was today, the search giant’s parent company has indeed become the world’s most valuable company. With their stock having sky rocketed in after-market trading, largely due to their glowing earnings report which beat Wall Street’s expectations by quite a bit. Alphabet’s net worth was around $558 billion, while Apple is currently sitting at around $534 billion. After the stock jumped by about 8%, it later went back down to around a 527% increase putting Alphabet’s worth at roughly $544 billion. Still a $10 billion lead over Apple for the world’s most valuable company. This could all change when the market opens tomorrow morning, however.
Alphabet released their earnings today and announced that in the fourth quarter of 2015 the company brought in around $21.3 billion in revenue. Beating Wall Street’s expectations. They also showed that while the company is spending money on moonshots, they are still spending far more on actually operating Google. As now Google is separated from moonshots which are listed under “Other Bets”. Moonshots did still lost around $3.6 billion in the quarter, however.
Google continues to see growth, especially in the US, but in all of its markets. On the earnings call this afternoon the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai announced that Gmail now has 1 billion users. That’s roughly around 1 in 7 people in the world using Google’s email services. It’s also the sixth service to hit 1 billion users from Google. That’s something you don’t hear everyday, and with Google being banned in a few countries – most notably China, who’s population is around 1.3 billion and the largest country (by population) in the world – that’s pretty impressive, to say the least. Of course, Google is going to continue to grow and create more services for users to utilize and show ads to those users. After all that is where Google’s money comes from, for the most part. Over 90% of their revenue comes from ads, still.