The Google parent Alphabet continues to benefit enormously from the digitization of life in the corona pandemic. In the past quarter, sales of the Internet company rose by 41 percent year-on-year to a good 65.1 billion dollars (56.1 billion euros). In terms of profits, there was a jump from $ 11.2 billion to $ 18.9 billion, as Alphabet announced after the US market closed on Tuesday.
As usual, Google’s advertising business contributed the lion’s share of revenues with $ 53.1 billion. While the ads around Google’s search engine are still the mainstay, the video platform Youtube also brings in more money. Its advertising revenue increased from $ 5 billion to $ 7.2 billion. But even with this significant increase, some were still disappointed.
Unlike Facebook, Google sees itself only marginally affected by Apple’s measures for more privacy on the iPhone. Since the summer, all app developers have had to explicitly ask iPhone users for permission if they want to track their activities across different applications and services for advertising purposes. According to surveys, most users reject this. Accordingly, many previous business models in the advertising industry are getting mixed up. According to Facebook, it has become more difficult to personalize advertising and to provide advertisers with data on the efficiency of their ads.
At Google, the ads are mainly placed for individual search terms – at this point Apple’s restrictions do not affect the Internet company. On YouTube, however, some ads were slightly affected by the changes, said CFO Ruth Porat.
The business with cloud services, in which Google wants to close the gap to Amazon and Microsoft, grew by around 45 percent to almost five billion dollars. Here, too, some analysts had expected more.
As before, Alphabets other subsidiaries make little turnover, for example with self-driving cars or delivery drones – but high losses. The collected revenues of these divisions hardly increased with an increase of 178 to 182 million dollars. They brought in an operating loss of around 1.29 billion dollars – after a loss of 1.1 billion dollars a year ago.
While Alphabet’s figures for the past quarter exceeded the forecasts of the analysts, the share temporarily fell 0.45 percent in after-hours trading.