Google parent Alphabet increases sales by 41 percent

Google parent Alphabet continues to benefit enormously from the digitalization of life in the Corona pandemic. In the past quarter, the Internet company's revenue rose by 41 percent year-on-year to a good 65.1 billion dollars (56.1 billion euros). In profit, there was a jump from 11.2 to 18.9 billion dollars, as Alphabet announced after U.S. stock market close on Tuesday.

As usual, Google's advertising business contributed the lion's share of revenue at $53.1 billion. While the ads surrounding Google's search engine continue to be the mainstay, the video platform YouTube is also bringing in more money. Its advertising revenues increased from $5 billion to $7.2 billion. But even with this significant growth, some were still disappointed.

Unlike Facebook, Google sees itself only slightly affected by Apple's measures for more privacy on the iPhone. All app developers have had to explicitly ask iPhone users for permission since the summer if they want to track their activities across different apps and services for advertising purposes. According to surveys, most users reject this. Accordingly, many previous business models in the advertising industry have been thrown into disarray. According to Facebook, it became more difficult to personalize advertising and provide advertisers with data on the effectiveness of their ads.

At Google, ads are mainly placed for individual search terms - at this point, Apple's restrictions don't bother the Internet company. On Youtube, however, some ads were slightly affected by the changes, said chief financial officer Ruth Porat.

The business with cloud services, where Google wants to close the gap to Amazon and Microsoft, grew by about 45 percent to almost five billion dollars. Here, too, some analysts had expected more.

As before, Alphabet's other subsidiaries, for example with self-driving cars or delivery drones, make little revenue - but high losses. The combined revenues of these businesses barely grew, rising from $178 million to $182 million. In the process, they brought in an operating loss of about 1.29 billion dollars - after a minus of 1.1 billion dollars a year ago.

While Alphabet's figures for the past quarter beat analysts' forecasts, the stock was down 0.45 percent at times in after-hours trading.