Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) 02 (Aug 17 - Dec 25)

[winston]

vested

If You Still Need a Reason to Buy Google Stock, Take a Look at AI

by Tom Taulli

Based on analysis from Tractica, the revenues from AI are forecasted to go from $9.5 billion in 2018 to a whopping $118.6 by 2025.

Algorithms have realized major cuts in energy usage for data centers and technology to improve disease detection.

The most prominent AI investment at Google is Waymo, which is the company’s autonomous vehicle division.

Waymo has also created a ride-sharing service, taking on Uber (NYSE:UBER) and Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT), that is available in Phoenix.

The goal is to essentially license the technology and data. To this end, Waymo has entered a partnership with Renault SA and Nissan Motor.

Fwd PE21

Source: Investor Place

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/still-re ... 37074.html

[winston]

vested

It has been a very strong four trading sessions for Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL, NASDAQ:GOOG).

First, shares gapped up from ~$1,080 to the notable $1,100 level.

Just a few sessions later, we have the stock pushing through both the 200-day and 50-day moving averages and hitting its highest level since May. Now what?

It’s possible shares go on a run ahead of earnings later this month. But I want to see how GOOGL stock does early next week near this 200-day and 50-day moving average. They are just a few dollars apart and it’s possible GOOGL reverses next week.

Should the rally continue, the $1,180 to $1,200 area is on the table. On a pullback, I want to see the ~$1,100 area hold up as support.

Source: Investor Place

[winston]

vested

Peter Thiel Urges U.S. Probe of Google’s ‘Seemingly Treasonous’ Acts

By Max Chafkin

July 15, 2019

The billionaire cites China work and dropped Pentagon contract
Thiel praises Trump’s aggressive posture toward China

In a speech Sunday in Washington, the billionaire singled out Google for agreeing to work closely with China, trying to get its search engine back into the country, while deciding to let lapse a U.S. Defense Department contract that gave the military access to its artificial intelligence tools.

He then suggested Google’s actions were “seemingly treasonous,” asking whether DeepMind or Google senior management had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence agencies. “These questions need to be asked by the FBI and the CIA,” Thiel said.

Source: Bloomberg

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... onous-acts

[winston]

vested

Alphabet rises after earnings beat, announces $25 billion share repurchase

by Lauren Feiner

Investors were disappointed last quarter by Google’s decelerating revenue growth.

Google now faces the threat of antitrust action as the Department of Justice is reportedly planning to probe the company and announced a separate, broad review of Big Tech.

Alphabet revenues beat expectations at $38.94 billion

Shares of Google parent company Alphabet rose more than 9% after the company reported second-quarter earnings that beat estimates Thursday.

Alphabet said its board of directors approved a repurchase of up to an additional $25 billion of its Class C capital stock.

Here are the key numbers:

Earnings per share: $14.21 per share, ex-items, vs. $11.30 per share expected, per Refinitiv survey of analysts

Revenue: $38.94 billion, vs. $38.15 billion expected, per Refinitiv

Traffic acquisition costs: $7.24 billion, vs. $7.27 billion, according to StreetAccount

Paid clicks on Google properties from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019: +28%

Cost-per-click on Google properties from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019: -11%

Alphabet beat analysts’ expectations on revenue and EPS but had even lower traffic acquisition costs (TAC) than analysts were hoping for. The metric represents the payments Google makes to companies like Apple for its search engine to be the default browser on their devices.

Google reported advertising revenue of $32.6 billion for the second quarter, compared to $28.09 billion during the same period last year.

Google’s other revenue, which includes hardware like its Pixel phones and cloud products, came in at $6.18 billion compared to $4.43 billion during last year’s quarter.

Porat said on the earnings call that cloud revenue made up the majority of this segment and was the third largest driver of overall Alphabet revenue growth.

Google recently installed a new cloud boss, Thomas Kurian, who has been charged with growing the business and has already made some splashy acquisitions, including analytics company Looker.

On the earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the cloud business reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion. Google said in February 2018 that its cloud business was bringing in $1 billion dollars per quarter, its first disclosure of Google Cloud revenue. Pichai said the company wants to triple its cloud salesforce over the next few years.

Alphabet said its revenue from “other bets,” which includes its subsidiaries outside of Google like the self-driving car company Waymo, came in at $162 million compared to $145 million in the year-ago quarter.

TAC as a percentage of Google advertising revenues was slightly lower this year compared to the previous year’s quarter at 22% compared to 23% in 2018. That means the amount Google has to pay other companies to make its service the default is becoming a less significant proportion compared to its advertising revenue. It’s a key figure that analysts and investors look at to assess the health of Google’s business.

Google saw a 28% increase in paid clicks on its properties in Q2 of 2019 compared to the same quarter last year. It also saw an 11% decrease in cost-per-click on Google properties over that same period.

Last quarter, shares of Alphabet tumbled when Google reported decelerating revenue growth, which it had blamed largely on YouTube. But this quarter, Porat said YouTube’s revenue was strong. While the company does not break out YouTube results, Porat provided some limited details on Thursday’s earnings call.

Porat clarified that her assessment that deceleration in YouTube click growth contributed to overall slowing revenue growth was not the result of removing content from its platform that violated its policies.

“The click and CPC growth were unrelated to actions on policy enforcement,” Porat said of YouTube.

Google now faces even broader threats to its business under the eye of U.S. and foreign antitrust regulators. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday it’s opening a broad antitrust review of big tech companies. Though it did not name specific companies, the department said it will review the practices of online platforms dominating areas including internet search.

Google has about 90% market share in internet search in the U.S. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported the DOJ is planning a separate antitrust probe into Google.

Last quarter, Alphabet recorded a European Commission fine of $1.7 billion as a settlement for stifling competition in the online ad sector. In June, the company said it had begun to appeal the fine.

Source: CNBC

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/25/alphabe ... KW,2KOKY,1

[winston]

vested

Alphabet revenue beats expectations as Google ad sales climb

by Emily McCormick

Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), the parent company for search giant Google, reported quarterly sales results that beat consensus expectations, rebounding after posting soft top-line results during the quarter prior.

Here were the key numbers from the report, versus estimates based on Bloomberg-compiled data:

Revenue ex-TAC: $31.71 billion vs. $30.84 billion expected

Adj. earnings: $14.21 vs. $13.97 per share expected

TAC, or traffic acquisition costs, refer to payments Internet search companies pay to affiliates to direct traffic to their websites.

In the second-quarter report, Alphabet also announced its board had authorized a $25.0 billion repurchase of its Class C common stock.

Ahead of results, investors were laser-focused on Google’s ad business, which posted weaker-than-expected sales during the first quarter. Alphabet derives most of its company-wide sales from Google’s advertising business.

Google’s ad sales for the second quarter totaled $32.6 billion, an increase of 16% over last year and slightly ahead of consensus expectations for $32.58 billion, based on Bloomberg-compiled estimates.

The acceleration in Google’s ad sales growth helped allay worries of a persistent slowdown in Alphabet’s core business. Prior to Thursday’s results, Google’s ad revenue had decelerated on a year-over-year basis in each quarter since the second quarter of 2018.

Meanwhile, Alphabet saw more of its revenue flow to its bottom line, with traffic acquisition costs comprising a smaller portion of Google advertising revenue than during the year-ago period.

Alphabet overall company operating margins improved to 24%, from 18% the quarter prior, and came in ahead of expectations for 22.6%.

“From improvements in core information products such as Search, Maps, and the Google Assistant, to new breakthroughs in AI and our growing Cloud and Hardware offerings, I’m incredibly excited by the momentum across Google’s businesses and the innovation that is fueling our growth,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.

Google’s management, during last quarter’s earnings call, attributed its first-quarter ad sales growth slowdown to product changes in ads in the past year. Over the past couple months, Google announced new monetization methods for its Discover Feed through new Discovery Ad formats and revamped Showcase Shopping Ads.

Source: Yahoo Finance

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet ... 03601.html

[winston]

not vested

Alphabet’s bounce-back quarter has shares, price targets on the rise

By Jon Swartz and Emily Bary

Google parent’s earnings showed ‘stronger signs of life than anticipated,’ says one analyst

Nice rebound from Q1,” Jefferies’ Brent Thill said of Alphabet’s 28% jump in year-over-year overall revenue to $38.94 billion in the second quarter.

Among the standout data points for him was Alphabet’s performance in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, where revenue climbed 15%, or 21% in constant currency.

Source: Market Watch

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alpha ... yptr=yahoo

[winston]

not vested

A Coming 300-Point Rally in Alphabet Stock

by Nicolas Chahine

GOOGL stock currently sells at a 24x trailing price-to-earnings ratio and six times sales. This is about 25% cheaper than Facebook.

Alphabet stock is trading inside of a 300-point range just above its weekly point-of-control at $1,060.

So if the bulls are able to break out from the $1,280 per share area, then they could trigger a 300-point rally from there.

So it is possible that by first quarter of next year, Google stock could be at $1,550 per share if the geopolitical headlines cooperate.

Source: Investor Place

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coming-3 ... 03049.html

[winston]

not vested

Stocks to Buy on the Dips: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL)

Alphabet is Making Up for Google's Lost Cloud Decade

The proof is in the pudding, and owning GOOGL stock has been very profitable over the years. I remember the days when I discussed entry around $90 per share, and that was before the split.

Alphabet stock here is not bloated from a valuation perspective. It sells at a reasonable 24 trailing price-to-earnings ratio and 5 times sales. In addition, it has $130 billion in cash and short-term investments on the balance sheet and little debt.

GOOGL stock has the support of its business model. This is a company that dominates one of the strongest trends of going online. So it has at least one massive cash cow and many others developing — mainly YouTube and its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo. Both still have tremendous income potential.

Moreover, Alphabet has a fortress of balance sheet which allows it to hunker down in case the difficult times do hit. It can then finance evasive actions that are necessary in order to defend its business or its stock.

It is also important to note that so far, Alphabet has done minimal financial engineering to prop up the GOOGL stock prices. This could be an incremental bid into the GOOGL stock.

Source: Investor Place

[winston]

not vested

Stocks to Buy on the Dips: Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL)

Alphabet is Making Up for Google's Lost Cloud Decade

The proof is in the pudding, and owning GOOGL stock has been very profitable over the years. I remember the days when I discussed entry around $90 per share, and that was before the split.

Alphabet stock here is not bloated from a valuation perspective. It sells at a reasonable 24 trailing price-to-earnings ratio and 5 times sales. In addition, it has $130 billion in cash and short-term investments on the balance sheet and little debt.

GOOGL stock has the support of its business model. This is a company that dominates one of the strongest trends of going online. So it has at least one massive cash cow and many others developing — mainly YouTube and its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo. Both still have tremendous income potential.

Moreover, Alphabet has a fortress of balance sheet which allows it to hunker down in case the difficult times do hit. It can then finance evasive actions that are necessary in order to defend its business or its stock.

It is also important to note that so far, Alphabet has done minimal financial engineering to prop up the GOOGL stock prices. This could be an incremental bid into the GOOGL stock.

Source: Investor Place

[winston]

vested

There aren't a lot of companies I would want to own for the next 50 years given the disruption taking place in the economy today.

Manufacturing is under pressure, energy is changing, and retail is being turned on its head. However, one company that has an upper hand in almost every business it enters is Alphabet, the search giant that now does everything from email to cloud hosting.

You can see the rapid growth of Alphabet's business over the past decade and the $35 billion of net income that it earned over the past year.

What that doesn't show is how much power the tech giant has to expand its business and fend off upstarts that might be its competition.

Alphabet has used its dominant position in search to enter email, maps, mobile and PC operating systems, voice recognition software, and many other products. The slow creep of products that Google makes that ingrain it more and more in people's lives also comes with data that makes search and other technology better. It's a feedback loop that gets bigger and bigger every year.

I don't think there's any end in sight to technology and software becoming more and more entrenched in our lives. Alphabet will continue to play an outsized role in that transition, and it's proven it has the ability to turn its technology into massive profits. That's the kind of business I want to own for the next 50 years.

Source: Motley Fool