Google’s parent company Alphabet has reported a net income of $23.62bn for the second quarter of 2024 (Q2 2024), a 28.6% increase compared to $18.36bn for the same quarter of the previous year but almost identical to earnings reported in Q1.
“Our strong financial results for the first quarter reflect revenue strength across the company and ongoing efforts to durably reengineer our cost base,” said Alphabet and Google’s president, chief investment officer, and chief financial officer Ruth Porat. “We delivered revenues of $80.5 billion, up 15% year-on-year, and operating margin expansion.”
Revenue growth attributed to strong cloud, search performance
Alphabet’s diluted earnings per share (EPS) in the reported second quarter ended 30 June 2024 were $1.89, an increase of 31%, compared to $1.44 reported in the same quarter of 2023. Meanwhile, the company’s revenues for Q2 2024, driven by its Search and Cloud segments, were up by 13.5% to $84.74bn, compared to $74.6bn in Q2 2023. In Q1 2024, Alphabet’s revenues were $80.54bn.
Alphabet earned $64.61bn in revenues from its Google advertising business in Q2 2024, an increase of 11% compared to $58.14bn in the same quarter of 2023. This revenue includes contributions from Google Search and others ($48.5bn), YouTube ads ($8.6bn), and Google Network ($7.44bn).
The total revenues earned by the Google Services business in Q2 2024 were around $74bn, an 11.5% increase, compared to $66.3bn in Q2 2023. Google Cloud earned revenues of $10.34bn for the reported quarter, an increase of 29% compared to $8bn in the corresponding period of 2023.
For the previous quarter, Alphabet posted revenues of $61.65bn in its Google advertising business. On the other hand, the Google Services business had earned $70.4bn during the same period.
Google Cloud’s revenues for the previous quarter stood at $9.57bn – strong figures that Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai attributed to strong performance in the firm’s search, YouTube and cloud divisions and growing excitement about its AI services therein. “We are well underway with our Gemini era and there’s great momentum across the company,” said Pichai. “Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, and our global product footprint, position us well for the next wave of AI innovation.”
Alphabet announces Waymo investment
During the Q2 2024 earnings call, Porat also announced a new multi-year investment of $5bn in American autonomous driving technology company Waymo. Last month, Waymo launched its robotaxi service in San Francisco.
The call follows a troubled few months for Alphabet as it struggles to fend off antitrust probes and market perceptions that any major acquisitions it makes will be subject to heightened scrutiny by competition regulators. In March this year, Google was fined €250m by French competition regulator Autorité de la Concurrence for intellectual property rights violations, with the search giant set to face two antitrust trials in the US later this year. A market investigation into alleged anti-competitive activities by hyperscaler cloud providers is also underway in the UK, with Google Cloud one of three such providers being probed by the Competition and Markets Authority.
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