Alphabet’s workforce became nearly 5,000 people stronger over the course of the first quarter of the year, the Mountain View, California-based firm revealed as part of its latest consolidated financial report earlier this week. Whereas the tech giant employed 80,110 individuals at the end of 2017, its workforce now numbers 85,050 employees, which is in line with what Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai announced several months back regarding the company’s growing expansion ambitions.
Alphabet’s headcount more than doubled over the course of the last half a decade, with the firm having 38,739 employees on the books in Q1 2013. While the company has been growing its workforce in an aggressive manner in recent times, its new first-quarter results are still above-average in that regard, largely due to its partial acquisition deal with HTC. Earlier this year, Alphabet-owned Google paid $1.1 billion in exchange for unrestricted access to HTC’s patent portfolio as part of an agreement that also saw approximately 3,000 employees join the company from the Taiwanese original equipment manufacturer. The move led to Taipei becoming the advertising giant’s largest technology hub in Asia, having been made as a direct attempt at boosting Google‘s hardware operations, particularly in the mobile segment.
Alphabet as a whole is still growing in a rapid manner and continues to break its quarterly records, having now posted $31.1 billion in revenue, a 26-percent annual increase. The firm also recorded over $7 billion in profit over the same period, up 22-percent year-on-year. The firm’s headcount grew by nearly 15-percent compared to Q1 2017 when it had some 11,000 fewer employees on the books. Alphabet is still largely reliant on advertising which generated over $26.4 billion of its total first-quarter revenues, with the rising traffic acquisition costs in the segment now being a cause of concern for some investors, though the Internet juggernaut’s stock is still being widely touted as one of the safest technology investments one can make.