Google’s parent company, Alphabet, overtook Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. The company disclosed its Q4 earnings for 2015 yesterday, that led to a rally during after-hours trading, helping it push past Apple. The report showed that the revenue generated at its core business, including Search, YouTube and Android, rose by 14% to $74.54 billion in 2015. In 2014, the company earned $65.67 billion. Other businesses were put together in a group called ‘Other Bets’, which included the likes of Google X, Google Fiber, self-driving cars and more. These generated $448 million in revenue, but lost $3.5 billion.
Alphabet as a whole generated a Q4 net income of $4.92 billion, or $7.06 per share, as compared to $6.79 per share during the same period in 2014. The company said that it would have earned $8.67 per share, if certain expenses were excluded. During after-hours trading, Alphabet shares rose 4.2% to $803.03, giving the company a market capitalization of about $560 billion. This pushed the company past Apple, which had a market capitalisation of $539.7 billion when Monday trading closed.
Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet, said, “Our very strong revenue growth in Q4 reflects the vibrancy of our business, driven by mobile search as well as YouTube and programmatic advertising, all areas in which we've been investing for many years. We're excited about the opportunities we have across Google and Other Bets to use technology to improve the lives of billions of people.”
Google isn’t the only company to release its earnings reports for the fourth quarter of 2015. According to Facebook’s report, the company earned record profits in Q4 2015 with 52% increase in revenue as compared to last year. The report also showed that the company generated $17.93 billion in revenue over the whole of 2015, with a net income of $3.69 billion. In addition, the reports showed that Facebook has over a billion daily active users, out of which 934 million access it via mobile devices.