Google’s Parent Company Alphabet Surpasses Apple To Become World’s Most Valuable Company

Alphabet is officially poised to cross Apple in market value in case both the companies on Tuesday open at the levels where they closed on Monday.

Alphabet has taken Apple’s position as the world’s most valuable company when after-hours trading drove its stock price up. On Monday, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, became the most valuable company in the world.

This was an 18pc increase year-on year for Alphabet.

Industry tracker, eMarketer, has projected that Google will remain the dominant player in worldwide search advertising, raking in United States dollars 45.58 billion in revenue this year to claim a share just shy of 57 percent of total spending on such ads.

Though Apple reported record profits in its own financial results last week, the California-based firm predicted iPhone sales would decline for the first time in the device’s history in the next quarter.

It’s the first time Alphabet has separated out the results of its Google business from the “Other Bets”.

“Keep in mind that Other Bets represents an aggregation of businesses, many of which operate in distinct sectors with different business models”, she said in an earnings call transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“Essentially, what they have now is a big advertising business and a venture capital business”, Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said of the new earnings presentation.

A Raymond James survey showed that 72 percent of investors expect “Other Bets” lost more than $1.5 billion in 2015.

Wall Street has fretted for years about how much the core Google business was being used to fund founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s ambitions to grow new businesses in robots, self-driving cars and spaceships.

In Q4 2014, Alphabet’s headcount rose to 61,814, up from 53,600 and 59,976 last quarters, mainly due to the addition of engineers and project managers.

“Additionally, mobile search should continue to increase as more content within apps gets indexed by Google”.

Paid clicks on Google websites were up 40% compared with the same period a year ago and up 22% compared with the previous quarter.

The company was under a lot of pressure to be more transparent over how much cash it was splashing on things like driverless cars, internet-enabled helium balloons and Google Glass.