Alphabet is the Most Valuable Company

The news beat analyst expectations and sent the company’s shares skyrocketing.

In the company’s earnings report, these are lumped together in “Other Bets”, obscuring quite how well each one is doing.

Google produced an operating profit of $6.8 billion in the fourth quarter of past year from a revenue of $17.1 billion after subtracting ad commissions.

Alphabet’s share price surge means the company is now worth around $568bn, compared with Apple’s value of $535bn.

Apple has surrendered its position at the apex for the first time since 2010, when it acquired the mantle from Microsoft. That ranking, of course, could shift again in regular trading Tuesday. Nonetheless, investors are cheered by today’s earnings report from Google’s parent, while expressing a bit of fear following Apple’s earnings release last week. In case you didn’t know or are still confused, Alphabet is Google’s parent company.

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) on Monday marked its first ever quarter of segment-based reporting.

Until now, the expenses of running those peripheral operations had been hidden in Google’s financial statement.

U.S. broker Wedbush said mobile search drove the figures, helped by desktop search, while YouTube doubled the number of small business advertisers in the last two years.

Google generated $14.94 billion in revenues from its own Websites, up 20% on the same quarter in 2014, while the contribution from its network members’ sites grew by 7% to $4.14 billion. That translates into a whopping profit margin of 40 percent.

The big gain for the company was advertising.

Ronald Josey of JMP Securities told the Reuters news agency investors would excuse those losses: “As long as the core business continues to operate well with accelerated revenue… investment in those businesses can continue”, he said. Google had become known for its free-spending habits and reluctance to share information with analysts. Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, put the losses down to the variation and early stages of the projects falling under this banner.