Google parent Alphabet ousts Apple as top global company

Google’s parent company posted strong earnings after stock markets closed on Monday, numbers that were good enough to push its stock up enough to make the company worth more than Apple.

Google owner Alphabet has knocked Apple off the top spot as the most valuable company in the world with its latest quarterly results.

The announcement sent its share price up as much as 9% in after-hours trading.

Apple took over from Microsoft as the most valuable company in 2010, a position previously occupied by IBM.

Alphabet now has a total market value of $558 billion (€511 billion) while Apple’s total value stands second at $535 billion (€490 billion).

The new achievement emerged following the company released its earning report that was the first in which Google was separated from “other bets”.

Alphabet’s reported quarterly profit rose 5% to $4.92 billion on the back of strong online advertising revenue, particularly from searches done by holiday season shoppers using smartphones or tablets.

The California-based Internet colossus stated its revenue topped United States dollars 21.3 billion in the final three months of past year. Apple shares dipped last week after reporting the slowest-ever increase in iPhone shipments and forecasting its first revenue drop in 13 years.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s other companies together produced an operating loss of $1.2 billion on revenue of just $151 million.

“Alphabet’s core business looks very healthy”, “That’s going to build investors’ confidence about the other bets they’ve been making”, said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co.

Revenue for Other Bets was $151 million, up 29.8 per cent from $106 million in the same quarter previous year, primarily from its smart-home monitoring unit Nest, Google Fiber, which provides high-speed Internet access, and its life sciences business Verily.

The reorganisation of Google into Alphabet was completed last October. As Google continues to pour earnings from its search business into its experimental endeavors, Porat wanted to give investors an understanding of how search sales are translating into search profit.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, racked up $3.6 billion in losses past year through investments in “big bets” such as self-driving cars and Internet balloons.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, on the call said Gmail has joined six other Google products – Android, Chrome, Google Play, Maps, Search, and YouTube – that enjoy more than 1 billion monthly users.