Alphabet comes before Apple as world’s most valuable company

Excluding one-time items and traffic-acquisition costs, Alphabet earned $8.67 a share on $17.2 billion in revenue. On the other end, the core business reported operating income of $23.4 billion for the year ended December 31, 2015.

For a while now, Apple has been the world’s most valuable company and has been maintaining that lead for a while now.

EMarketer estimates that YouTube ad revenue rose 40.6% a year ago, reaching $4.28 billion worldwide, as more consumers relied on the video site to compare products gain information on gift options for the holidays.

Alphabet’s financial results were revealed for the first time since it was set up as the parent company for Google and its other subsidiaries.

It has only been alive since August, but Google’s parent company – Alphabet – has replaced Apple as the most valuable company in the US. We gave you advance notice that this might happen late last month when Alphabet’s enterprise value (which adds debt and subtracts cash from the market cap) surpassed Apple’s. If currency values had stayed the same, Alphabet’s revenue would have grown 24%, a difference of about $1 billion.

Specifically, we now have our first real indication of how much money Alphabet is sinking into its experimental and research-based projects, outside of the core Google business. The announcement sent its share price up as much as 9% in after-hours trading.

Alphabet’s Other Bets consist of other projects such as Google Fiber, Nest, Calico, GV (Google Ventures), Google Capital, X (Google X) and a few other important initiatives. “We’re looking to push the frontier in Google and in other bets”. For the full year, Alphabet’s other companies lost $3.6 billion on revenue of $448 million. The company said advertising revenue jumped 17% to $19.08 billion, with the number of paid clicks up 31%.

“I would have to say that the resulting story certainly tells the story that Google wants to tell more than providing the insights that people want to see”, said Adam Berke, president and CMO of AdRoll, an online advertising retargeting company.