Seven wonders of a resurgent Google world

Source: David Ball - www.davidball.net

Google’s holding company Alphabet just confirmed yet another one-billion-users service under its hood—Gmail. The other six Google services to have already achieved one billion users or more are Search, Chrome, Android, Google Play, Maps, and YouTube. 

That’s not all the good news for Google and its investors—its fourth-quarter earnings seem to have surprised them rather pleasantly, while beating consensus analyst estimates by a notch.

Moreover, Google’s upbeat results happen to come at a time when the hitherto darling of tech markets—Apple—has been taking some beating at the bourses after its quarterly results, despite clocking record profits by any company ever. The Cupertino-based iPhone maker has seen slowing iPhone sales and also warned revenues would fall next quarter, for the first time since 2007.

On the contrary, Google continues to show growth in revenue and profits, though its net income for the quarter at $4.92 billion is nearly one-fourth of Apple’s whopping $18.4 billion.

The news sent Alphabet shares up, which is still listed as GOOG on Nasdaq, by as much as five percent at the time of writing this post. That enabled the GOOG stock to surpass Apple’s AAPL in market capitalization for the first time since 2010, making Alphabet the world’s most valuable company in the process.

Google’s Alpha bets seem to be paying off well indeed!