Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Results (opens in new tab)

It's one thing for a midsize company to grow revenue 41% but for a massive global corporation with 156,000 employees to do it is nothing short of astounding.

And this giant, mature company isn't sacrificing margins for top-line growth, they're actually increasing margins at the same time.

Truly breathtaking.

>and "Other bets" did $181B

you're sure?

Up ~10% after market. Should be around 2T Market Cap now. Apple is 2.8T while M$ is 2.3T.

I think I am very good at numbers, comparatively speaking. But these number is till mind boggling. It is hard to comprehend how and why they could continue to grow. With $140B cash while Android is still half polished. GCP not competing. And killing half a dozen random products and services from time to time.

I think your math on that €43B up is wrong. At least it would be strange if they more than doubled search from last year's Q4, but just grew 41%.

>t it's basically impossible to escape the ads on it these days, so it's not surprising

ublock origin seems to do fine.

Unless you are suggesting that the ad-ladden SEO'd pages are their real product?

Not just search. it is the entire internet, save for Facebook's properties and few others. huge.

Out of broken search actually. Pretty amazing.

Growth is primarily due to demand - by advertisers, not the users. Online ad spending increased during the pandemic and is expected to continue to grow throughout this decade. Advertisers flush with cash are looking to spend it online. And google, fb, etc are more than happy to oblige. Google is simply increasing the supply ( ads ) to meet the demand ( advertisers ). This sadly means we'll be seeing more and more ads online...

This is one of significant misconception for digital marketing. More ads doesn't necessarily mean more revenue since it's bound by total advertising budget. Let's assume an optimal ads market and you put more ads there without further optimization or budget, then there will be less auction pressure per ads (thus less CPM) and roughly similar revenue. For something like 40% YoY growth at Google's scale, you need to convince big advertisers to allocate more budgets.

They don't even need growth. Their earnings and profit margins are high enough that they can deliver billions of dollars of value every quarter to shareholders absent of growth.

I think operating income is probably a better metric to look at to compare.

Walmart has a higher revenue than all of the above (~140 billion)

More perspective.

Apple: founded in 1976 (46 years old)

Microsoft: 1975 (47 years old)

Google: 1998 (24 years old)

Perspective is weird with large amounts of money. I think human brains are just not good at big numbers. You need something to compare it to, and the big numbers of other companies still leave it completely abstract.

Perhaps it might work better with a comparison to a person, like "Alphabet made so much revenue this quarter that, assuming they had no expenses, after a full year, Alphabet would have roughly as much money as Elon Musk." But maybe not, because now you've just moved the problem to understanding how rich Elon Musk is.

More perspective (estimates):

Meta $33.4 billion

Amazon $134 billion

iphone earns 100B

pixel earns 100M..

The 3-year figure was always totally unhinged from the actual useful life of cloud servers. As evidence, please refer to the fact that on EC2 you can still provision a C4 instance with a Haswell CPU made in 2014. In GCE you can still provision an N1 instance with a Sandy Bridge CPU from 2012.

This makes the stock price in line with other dow jones stocks, something that Apple did right before it was included in the Dow average. The Dow unlike other indices does not weight by market cap or anything like that it literally uses the stock prices.

Which makes options contracts cheaper, and it cheaper for retail to open shorts against them.

I wonder if there is a psychological effect that could push more stock growth?

That will price shares back to their IPO level in 2004, $130/140 a share.

It seems like there should be a limit to the ad market, though? Also, isn't increasing ad blindness a thing? (Even without ad blockers.)

Margin or options would give you leveraged exposure.

FNGO & FNGU

Azure doesn't mint money. If you look closely at any numbers MSFT reports whenever Azure is part of the mix, the margins drop considerably though revenue growth jumps. I had looked closely at their reports about a year ago.

Azure is usually bundled with some very profitable if stagnant pieces like Windows Server or SQL Server when reported on. You never see pure Azure numbers.

Google is buying business and is happier to give discounts(sustained use pricing for example).

Amazon and Microsoft uses AWS and Azure themselves. Google doesn't use GCP, the service you buy is not the service Google engineers use internally. This both means that GCP cannot bill the rest of Google to inflate their own numbers and that GCP likely are less battle tested since they don't have a huge internal customer.

Not sure if this is really much different, but superficially it looks like its up ~45% (5.5 billion from 3.8)

I am more surprised by having such stunning growth by many big tech without actually having any new businesses. It used to be that 10% growth was a lot and now people scoff at even 30%.

Anyone have handy YoY growth numbers for AWS and Azure?

I don't know how many others think like I do, but I'd never use GCP. No one will ever convince me that it'll be around in 5 years. I just don't trust them to keep anything they made in the past decade or so going long term. Call me paranoid, call me whatever you want, but I just do not trust their ability to focus on anything anymore.

Google is many things, but poor search results is not one of them. Still the best search engine around, being too good is the problem most people have

Not sure if sarcasm or not. These results demonstrate that the HN zeitgeist about the utility of Google is not related to its actual utility to the public at large.