Alphabet jumps 14% on Earnings Beat and First Ever Dividend!

🌟🌟🌟I am so thrilled today to see $Alphabet(GOOGL)$  $Alphabet(GOOG)$  jump 14% as Google reported results that beat analysts expectations, showed soaring profits in its Cloud Division and announced its first ever dividend.    Google's market capitalisation is now over USD 2 Trillion!

Google's Earnings per share was USD 1.89 versus USD 1.51 expectations.  Revenue for Q1 24 quarter was USD 80.54 billion versus USD 78.59 expectations.

YouTube advertising revenue was USD 8.09 billion versus USD 7.72 billion expected.  Google Cloud revenue was USD 9.57 billion versus USD 9.35 billion expected.  

Google's revenue increased 15% from  USD 69.79 billion a year earlier.  It is the fastest rate of growth since early 2022.

What is really nice is that Google's management approved a cash dividend of 20 cents per share to be paid on June 17.  It goes ex dividend on June 10.  Google also said it intends to pay quarterly cash dividends in the future.

Google's dividend follows Meta which announced its first dividend in February this year.

Google also authorised the repurchase of an additional USD 70 billion in shares.  Google closed the quarter with cash, equivalents and marketable securities of USD 108 billion, down slightly from  USD 110.9 billion a year ago. 

Net Income jumped a huge 57% to USD 23.66 billion, or USD 1.89 a share from USD 15.05 billion or USD 1.17 a share in the previous year.

Google reported Total Advertising Sales of USD 61.66 billion, up from USD 54.55 billion a year ago.  Google's core advertising business is growing after a difficult 2022 and 2023 when rising interest rates and inflationary concerns forced companies to cut back on advertising spending.

Operating income in Google's cloud business increased more than 4 times to USD 900 million.  This shows that Google is finally generating substantial profits after investing in the cloud business to keep up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Google has also been investing heavily in AI, adding Generative AI features to search and other services to ensure that consumers continue using Google tools  even as the way they seek information online changes. 

Google still dominates the global search market with 91% while Microsoft's Bing is only 3.35% and YANDEX is 1.65%.

I am so glad that I held onto my Google 's shares when it dropped below USD 100 and now I am up 51%. 

As the late Charlie Munger likes to say "The Big Money is not in the Buying and Selling but in the Waiting."

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