Unlock the digestive of free editor
Roula Khalaf, the FT editor, chooses her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Alphabet revenue estimates underestimations in the fourth quarter as the research giant’s cloud business increased more slowly than expected as it continued to accelerate its expenses to the database in response to the demand from artificial intelligence.
Revenue increased 12 percent to $ 96.5bn in three months by December compared to the same period a year earlier. Excluding the costs of buying traffic, this figure was $ 81.6 billion, missing Wall Street ratings in a Bloomberg survey of 82.8bn $. Net revenue increased 28 percent to $ 26.5 billion.
The shares of the alphabet dropped more than 6 percent in the post -time trade. The shares had previously increased 45 percent in the last 12 months, giving it a $ 2.5 market capitalization and making it the fifth most valuable company listed in the world after Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon.
While the Google Cloud Services business posted a 30 percent increase to nearly $ 12 billion, this was slower than the 35 percent growth rate in the third quarter, and below 12.2BN analysts had predicted.
Alphabet expenses on infrastructure and he continued to escalate in step with her rivals of Silicon Valley. The fourth quarter’s capital costs increased to $ 14.3 billion, from $ 11 billion last year and exceeding expectations by $ 13.2 billion.
Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said: “We are confident about opportunities forward and accelerating our progress, we expect to invest approximately $ 75BN in capital expenditure in 2025.”
Last week, Microsoft revealed that she spent $ 22.6BN in the comparable three-month period, but its shares fell sharply after sales in its Cloud Azure calculation unit also disappointed. Meta Capex’s quarter was $ 14.6 billion, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledging to spend “hundreds of billions” more to stay in his search vanguard and products.