Alphabet, Google’s parent company reportedA strong fourth quarter in fiscal year 2021 was consistent with a wider tech industry rebound following a decline across the stock exchange last month.
YouTube advertising revenue was $8.63 Billion, which is slightly less than the $8.87 Billion expected by analysts. This was an increase of $6.88 billion from Q4 last year.
The company’s quarterly revenue was $75 billion, up 32% year over year, with the Google parent pointing to strong advertiser spend and high consumer online activity. Its Google Cloud services are also responsible for a large portion of the company’s revenue growth.
YouTube, by comparison, is surpassing Netflix in quarterly revenue. Netflix reported a Q4 2021 revenue of $7.7 billion, an increase of $6.6 billion from the previous year.
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Alphabet as well as Google. “Our deep investment in AI technologies continues to drive extraordinary and helpful experiences for people and businesses, across our most important products. Q4 saw ongoing strong growth in our advertising business, which helped millions of businesses thrive and find new customers, a quarterly sales record for our Pixel phones despite supply constraints, and our Cloud business continuing to grow strongly.”
Apple and Microsoft both reported strong earnings last week and set a positive tone, despite ongoing supply chain and workforce issues.
Alphabet’s earnings per share was $30.69, higher than analyst expectations of $27.34, according to Refinitiv. Refinitiv also reported that revenue was $75.33 billion higher than expected, compared to $72.17 billion. Google’s advertising revenue was at $61.24 billion for this quarter, up 33% from $46.2 billion the previous year.
Google Cloud revenue was slightly higher than expected at $5.47 billion at $5.54 billion. The revenue grew by around 45% to beat the cloud unit forecasts.