Google-owned Alphabet released figures for the first quarter at the close of trading on Thursday evening. The technology giant, which has reported increasing growth for the last four quarters, once again delivered stronger than expected.
The company earned $80.5 billion in the first quarter, compared to $69.79 billion in the same quarter last year. This is a turnover growth of over 15 per cent.
In advance, the analysts expected a turnover of 78.73 billion dollars, an increase of 15 percent from the same period last year, according to the WSJ.
The company reported earnings per share of $1.89. In advance, earnings of $1.51 per share were predicted.
The tech giant also announced that it will pay a dividend for the first time in June this year at 20 cents per share. In addition to a buyback of 70 billion dollars of shares, for the benefit of the company and shareholders.
Delivered solid numbers
Google’s income comes, among other things, from digital advertisements linked to various Google services such as YouTube and the search engine itself, in addition to AI technology and the cloud service Google Cloud.
Ahead of the release of the numbers, the analysts have been keeping a close eye on Alphabet’s income from the Google Cloud business, YouTube ads and the company’s AI technology.
The company reported earnings of $9.57 billion from its Google Cloud segment. The market had previously expected a turnover of 9.25 billion dollars.
The tech giant had revenue from YouTube ads of 8.09 billion dollars, against an expected 7.72 billion dollars.
Launched own language model
Google is still in the AI race and recently took up the fight again when they launched their own language model Gemini, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, among other things.
Google plans to license Gemini to its customers through the Google Cloud platform, so that customers can leverage them in their own applications.
The Alphabet share has risen 60 percent in the past year, and is up 11 percent so far this year.
In after-market trading, the share rises by more than 13 per cent at 22:40.
