Google parent Alphabet reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2019 of yesterday. And while the company witnessed a decent 17% QoQ growth when compared to last year, its Q4 revenues of $46.08 billion were below wall street estimates. According to Refinitiv estimates, market expectations for quarterly revenues stood at $46.98 billion.
And while the miss wasn’t too big for a company of Alphabet’s size, markets went harsh with Alphabet shares sliding as much as 4% in after-hours trading. More details on company’s numbers can be found here.
However, what’s interesting this time is Alphabet’s disclosure of revenues individually for Youtube and Google Cloud. This is the first time that the company has done that, after it received constant feedback from the industry and markets alike, to disclose individual unit earnings. Nevertheless, we finally have a breakdown and it looks promising.
To start with, Youtube earned Alphabet $15.15 billion in the year 2019 with $4.72 billion in the fourth quarter alone. The segment generated $11.16 billion in revenue in 2018, including $3.61 billion in the the fourth quarter of that year. Interestingly though, this does not include non-advertising revenue like those form subscriptions of Youtube TV etc. All of that is a part of the ‘other segments’ revenue section.
Talking about revenues from Youtube and Google Cloud, Alphabet’s newly appointed CEO Sundar Pichai said, ““I’m really pleased with our continued progress in Search and in building two of our newer growth areas — YouTube, already at $15 billion in annual ad revenue, and Cloud, which is now on a $10 billion revenue run rate”. The terms “newer growth areas” is of importance, as it highlights possible change in business strategy for the company going forward.
Coming to Google Cloud, the unit generated $8.92 billion in revenue in fiscal 2019, with $2.61 billion generated in the fourth quarter. That compares with 2018 revenue of $5.84 billion for the cloud business, with $1.71 billion generated in the fourth quarter of that year. Google Cloud is fairly young when compared with Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft Azure but has acquired significant market share in the time that it has existed.
These separate disclosures for revenues come at a time when Google’s overall transparency has been under intense scrutiny. Analysts for long have asked for revenue breakdown by service, specially Youtube. As is clearly visible from the breakdown, Youtube forms a significant portion of company’s overall advertising revenue, hence the ask.
