Thanks to Google, Wall Street reaches record levels

The Nasdaq index hit a record level intraday on Wednesday following strong quarterly data from Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube).

Shares of Alphabet (Google) gained 7.4%, after reporting its quarterly balance, now at $ 2,070. This rally brings the search engine’s market capitalization to $ 1.39 trillion.
After Facebook and Apple last week, Google and Amazon delivered their balance sheets for the last quarter of 2020 on Tuesday, to confirm in the case of the former their control of the internet advertising market and, in the latter, their dominance of commerce in line.

Alphabet, exceeded expectations in the last quarter of 2020, adding a net profit of USD 15.2 billion, which represents an increase of 50% in one year.

The company achieved a turnover of USD 56.9 billion, about 10 billion more than a year ago, and well above the USD 53 billion expected by analysts.

These strong results «were driven by Search (Google’s search engine) and YouTube, while our customer and commercial activity rallied from the beginning of the year,» Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.

Like its rivals Amazon, Apple or Facebook; Google was strengthened during the pandemic because the demand for its services increased due to various lockdown measures.

Google raised $ 46 billion in ad revenue in the last quarter of 2020, nearly 7 billion of which was generated on the YouTube video platform.

In spring, the Californian group hit a lower net profit than in 2019, due to its exposure to the advertising budgets of large advertisers hard hit by the pandemic, such as tour operators. Although since then he has managed to recover.

«The three main categories of ad revenue exceeded our expectations, including YouTube, which increased 46% from the fourth quarter of the previous year,» Nicole Perrin, analyst at eMarketer, told Reuters.

This study firm forecasts USD 116.7 billion of net advertising revenue for Google in 2021 (+ 18.5% in one year), which means almost 30% of that market.

The branch of remote computing (cloud computing) generated 3.8 billion dollars from October to December, which means an increase of 1.2 billion dollars compared to the previous year.

«Our strong results this quarter show the extent to which our products and services help people and businesses, accelerating the transition to digital services and the cloud,» said Alphabet and Google Chief Sundar Pichai.