Parent company of Google, Alphabet’s revenue increased to the tune of 24% over last year to a figure of over 32.3 billion. Net revenue stood at $25.9 billion. Both figures exceeded expectations. The company registered a net loss of $3.02 billion, thanks to a new tax legislation in the final quarter.
However, Sundar Pichai, CEO Google, and Ruth Porat, CFO of Google and Alphabet, clearly explained as to where these numbers are leading the company and the main areas of investments, cloud, hardware and YouTube and what they actually mean to the public and Google users at large.
#1: Google Assistant now works on over 400 million devices
There are over 400 different car models, home speakers, headphones, televisions and tablets that have the Assistant working on them. Millions of Google devices have made their way into homes last year. This includes models such as Google Mini, Max, Home and Chromecast. The aim of the company is to better organize information through the technologies and devices that Google is pioneering. The mega exhibition CES in Las Vegas also added more excitement to Google Assistant. Google had aggressively promoted the capabilities of Google Assistant in the show.
#2: There were 3 billion Google photos to usher in the New Year
Pichai made an observation that photography was making a lot of strides with help from AI. Pixel 2 phone models have implemented video stabilization as well as machine learning to provide stiff competition to other smartphone video standards.
#3: Google Cloud is a revenue grosser
The Google Cloud which includes both Google Cloud and the G suite brings in revenue of $ 1 billion per quarter. According to reports, it is the fastest growing cloud services provider across the world. There are over 4 million G Suite customers that pay for the services.
#4: There are over 1.5 billion visits by people on YouTube in a month
According to statistics there are over 1.5 billion views in a month of learning videos. YouTube now functions in 90 countries around the world in 80 local languages. Another interesting statistic is that more individuals are watching traditional TV shows via YouTube (news, serials, etc.). For instance, January 30 saw President Donald Trump’s State of Union Address gathering over 5 million views.
#5: Self-driving car business of Google clocked 1 million miles in the span of the last six months
Waymo is the name given to Google driver-less car division. According to figures given by Ruth Porat, CFO of Alpahbet and Google, the time taken to complete the last 1 million of the total 4 million miles was only six months. The first million miles took about 18 months to complete. These self-driving cars cover up to 10000 miles every day on public roads. Waymo cars have the distinction of being the only fleet of self-driving cars that operate completely in an autonomous fashion.