Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc, on Thursday reported that profit in the recently ended quarter leapt as money poured in from advertisements delivered to mobile devices and as returns improved on other subsidiaries.
Alphabet profit was up 32.4 percent to US$6.7 billion on revenue that increased 24 percent to US$27.8 billion, up 24 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat credited “strength across Google and Other Bets.”
The earnings topped market expectations and Alphabet shares jumped in after-market trade on the NASDAQ, before concerns about growing expenses apparently caused them to settle back a bit to be up nearly 3 percent to US$1,021.
While mobile advertisements were a main area of growth, they brought with them higher traffic acquisition costs, pushing up Google expenses in a trend seen as unavoidable.
Investing in cloud services and artificial intelligence also means spending more on datacenters to provide the massive computing power involved.
“I’ve been really proud of the progress this quarter; launching popular new products and continuing to grow our business in new areas,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said in an earnings call with analysts.
“It’s been particularly exciting to see our early bet on artificial intelligence pay off and go from a research project to something that can solve new problems for 1 billion people a day,” he said.
YouTube continued to see “phenomenal growth” with more than 1.5 billion people spending an average of an hour a day watching videos there on mobile devices and surging use on television screens in homes, according to Pichai.
He boasted of progress winning businesses over to Google services hosted in the Internet cloud, in which market the company competes with Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp.
Amazon on Thursday also reported earnings that topped expectations, boosting revenue from its fresh acquisition of grocery chain Whole Foods Market Inc and an expanded lineup of devices tapping into its digital assistant Alexa.
Profit for the third quarter was US$256 million, up slightly from US$252 million a year earlier, while revenue jumped 34 percent to US$43.7 billion.
Shares in Seattle-based Amazon rallied nearly 8 percent to US$1,050 in after-hours trade on the stronger-than-expected results.
In its earnings statement Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos focused on Amazon’s fast-growing digital assistant Alexa, which is included in its connected speakers and third-party products ranging from appliances to automobiles.
“In the last month alone, we’ve launched five new Alexa-enabled devices, introduced Alexa in India, announced integration with BMW, surpassed 25,000 skills, integrated Alexa with Sonos speakers, taught Alexa to distinguish between two voices, and more,” Bezos said.
“Customers have purchased tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices... With thousands of developers and hardware makers building new Alexa skills and devices, the Alexa experience will continue to get even better,” he said.
Separately, Microsoft on Thursday delivered stronger-than-expected earnings for the past quarter, lifted by gains in cloud computing and other business services.
For its first fiscal quarter to Sept. 30, the tech giant said profit was up 16 percent from a year ago to US$6.6 billion, while revenue rose 12 percent to US$24.5 billion for the one-time tech sector leader which has shifted its focus away from consumer software to a range of enterprise services.
Shares in Microsoft jumped 3.2 percent to US$81.35 for in after-hours trade following the release.
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