Google CEO Sundar Pichai
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Alphabet reported Q2 2021 earnings after the bell. The stock rose as much as 4% after hours on the strong numbers, which crushed analyst expectations.
Here are the results.
- Earnings per share (EPS): $27.26 vs $19.34 per share, according to Refinitiv estimates.
- Revenue: $61.88 billion vs $56.16 billion, according to Refinitiv estimates.
- YouTube advertising revenue: $7.00 billion vs $6.37 billion expected, according to StreetAccount estimates.
- Google Cloud revenue: $4.63 billion vs $4.40 billion expected, according to StreetAccount estimates.
- Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $10.93 billion vs $9.74 billion expected, according to StreetAccount estimates.
Total Google ad revenue increased to $50.44 billion, up 69% from the year-ago quarter, which was hurt by the onset of the Covid pandemic.
Retail was by far the largest contributor to the company’s ad growth, said Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler in the earnings call Tuesday.
YouTube revenue came in over $7 billion, up 83% from last year, drawing close to Netflix’s quarterly revenue, which was $7.34 billion. YouTube Shorts, the company’s new TikTok competitor, just surpassed 15 billion daily views, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in the earnings call. That is up from 6.5 billion daily views in March.
Google Cloud brought in $4.63 billion — up from $3.01 billion a year ago.
The cloud business had operating losses of $591 million, a dramatic improvement from last year’s loss of $1.43 billion. Google Cloud includes infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools such as Google Docs and Sheets, and “other services for enterprise customers.”
The company also recorded a quarterly net income benefit of $561 million, and EPS benefit of $0.83, from an accounting change related to the useful lifespan of its server and network equipment. That change took effect at the beginning of the year.
Alphabet chief financial officer Ruth Porat said she expects more “muted” revenue growth in next quarter.
Porat told CNBC the company’s back to work plans are still on track for September. Employees will be allowed “voluntary work from home” at least through the beginning of that month, she added.
Pichai kicked off the earnings call by encouraging everybody to get the Covid-19 vaccine.
