Alphabet shares drop 9% on company revenue miss

Google parent company Alphabet shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company reported fourth-quarter results that missed on revenue expectations.

Earnings per share beat analyst estimates by two cents.

Here are the numbers:

• Revenue: $96.47 billion vs. $96.56 billion expected by LSEG
• Earnings per share: $2.15 vs. $2.13 expected by LSEG

Here are other numbers Wall Street was watching:

• YouTube advertising revenue: $10.47 billion vs. $10.23 billion, according to StreetAccount
• Google Cloud revenue: $11.96 billion vs. $12.19 billion, according to StreetAccount
• Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $14.89 billion vs. $15.01 billion, according to StreetAccount

The company also announced that it plans to invest $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as it continues to expand on its artificial intelligence strategy. That’s above the $58.84 billion that Wall Street expected, according to FactSet. Alphabet said it expects capital expenditures for the first quarter to come in between $16 billion and $18 billion, which was also ahead of the $14.3 billion that was expected, per FactSet.

Alphabet’s capital expenditures for the quarter was $14 billion, which is higher than the $13.26 billion Wall Street was expecting, according to StreetAccount.

CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on an earnings call with investors that the figure primarily reflects the company’s investment in its technical infrastructure, with the largest component being investments in servers, followed by data centers “to support the growth of our business across Google Services, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind.”

The company’s overall revenue grew nearly 12% year over year, which is down from the more than 13% revenue growth that the company saw in the same quarter last year.

The company’s fourth-quarter net income increased by more than 28% to $26.54 billion from $20.69 billion a year prior.

Alphabet also reported disappointing cloud revenue at $11.96 billion during the quarter, compared to $12.19 billion, expected by Wall Street. Despite the miss, the cloud unit’s revenue increased by 30% from the year prior. Alphabet has been drawing profit from the cloud business as it tries to keep up with market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Asked if revenue for the company’s cloud unit could have been higher with more compute capacity, Ashkenazi said the company had strong demand for AI products in the fourth quarter, and that it “exited the year with more demand than we had available capacity.”

“We are in a tight supply-demand situation, working very hard to bring more capacity online.” Ashkenazi continued, saying the company will be adding more capacity throughout the year.

The company’s search business came out to $54.03 billion, up from $48.02 billion a year ago. Google’s advertising revenue came out to $72.46 billion, up from $65.52 billion a year ago.

Alphabet’s Other Bets segment, which includes the company’s life sciences unit Verily and self-driving car unit Waymo, reported revenue of $400 million in the fourth quarter. That came behind Wall Street’s expectations of $616.4 million, according to StreetAccount, and it was down more than 39% from $657 million in the same quarter last year.

The company made a series of announcements in the fourth quarter related to Waymo, showing confidence in its ability to commercialize its self-driving car company more quickly.

Waymo’s robotaxi service now operates in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, covering more than 500 square miles of public roads. In December, the company said it plans to launch its commercial service in Austin, Texas, and through the Uber app in Austin and Atlanta in 2025. The company also announced that it will begin testing Waymo in Tokyo, its first international expansion.

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