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Google Earning Q1 2024 [pdf]
- pb7 2y agoStock is +13% after hours so far.
- samspenc 2y agoWow they announced their first-ever dividend (following Meta which announced theirs last quarter).
- lupire 2y agoLeading from behind.
- guyzero 2y agoyes, thank goodness Meta finally invented dividends.
- jldugger 2y agowas there a tax law change that motivated this versus more buybacks?
- mtremsal 2y agothey're doing both?
- jldugger 2y agoSure, but why do both and why now?
- mrep 2y agoYes, they've started taxing stock buybacks (albeit it started a year ago): https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/treasury-irs-issue-guidance-on-corporate-stock-repurchase-excise-tax-in-advance-of-forthcoming-regulations https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/treasury-irs-issue-guidance-on-...
- wferrell 2y agofast follow ;)
- endisneigh 2y agoFascinating that they’re issuing a dividend. Can’t find anything better to do to drive growth?
- neel8986 2y agoIt is $300B/year company growing at 15%. I don't think growth is an issue here
- endisneigh 2y agoBetter
- duringmath 2y agoIt's not like they can make any major acquisitions in this political environment.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoGoogle has $100B+ of cash and is giving out $10B/yr as a dividend. I think they will be able to scrape something together if they have a good idea.
- endisneigh 2y agoYes - and what they’ve decided is a dividend. It’s the first in their history. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s something.
- lupire 2y agoThe interesting part is why they chose to issue a dividend instead of sticking only with a theoretically equivalent buyback.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoPut money in Larry and sergey's pockets without them having to sell any shares?
- darth_avocado 2y ago> Alphabet’s Board of Directors today authorized the company to repurchase up to an additional $70.0 billion of its Class A and Class C shares in a manner deemed in the best interest of the company and its stockholders The most important item on the report
- WheatMillington 2y agoWhy don't American companies pay dividends? I assume it's not tax efficient to pay dividends in the US?
- wskinner 2y agoIf you as a shareholder receive a dividend of X% of the share price, you owe tax on it. But if the company buys back stock and as a result the share price increases by X%, you do not owe tax on that unrealized gain until you choose to sell your stock. That’s good for investors.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y agoAlso, dividends are taxed as ordinary income whereas stock buybacks lead to capital gains, which almost always have a lower tax rate.
- e_y_ 2y agoQualified dividends are taxed at the same rate as long term capital gains, although the rules for what qualifies can be tricky (special one-time dividends in particular).
- HDThoreaun 2y agoOnly if youve held the stock for less than 6 months. Most dividends are taxed at capital gains rate.
- creativeSlumber 2y agobut there is no guarantee of a stock buyback increasing the stock price by x%, correct?
- dmckinno 2y agoI thought that this earnings announcement would be the first one where we'd see some impact from competitive knowledge engines, e.g. Perplexity, You.com, ChatGPT + Bing, etc., but Google still grew search $6B/15%. This is impressive both because it's hard to keep such a big business growing at that rate and because essentially everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information. I guess our demographic is not predictive of the larger market.
- arathis 2y agoAlso worth noting that ChatGPT, while big in tech circles, most people don't use it day to day.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- foogazi 2y ago> everyone in my social circle has moved on from going to Google first for information Or have they ?
- Workaccount2 2y agoI'll admit that despite having a GPT4 sub which I use often, I still fallback on google for quick questions and verification of what GPT4 says if I need to be certain. Not even because I am particularly going to google, it's just so heavily integrated.
- londons_explore 2y agoI find GPT4 requires long queries to get much out. And I can't be bothered typing out a long query if Google can give me the same in 3 words and scanning down the result page.
- asadm 2y agoyou will like perplexity pro then?
- addaon 2y agoInteresting that they think they're out of internal projects and acquisitions to (profitably) spend money on. Even more interesting that the stock seems to agree -- I guess investors already believed that growth is over, and are seeing this recognition of that as an alignment between reality and internal strategy.
- summerlight 2y agoThe only major investment left would be computing infrastructures, but it's severely limited by supply. Even if Google wants to spend more money, simply there's no chips to buy. I don't see any significant future investment opportunities other than Waymo in the foreseeable future, but it seems still far from scaling out.
- addaon 2y ago> Even if Google wants to spend more money, simply there's no chips to buy. This strongly suggests that there's an opportunity to spend money relaxing this shortage. If your business growth is being throttled by suppliers, then investment either allows you to grow those suppliers, or vertically integrate them out of the picture.
- utensil4778 2y agoYou can't just create new supply. Chip fabs take multiple years to spool up. You also have to get the machines to make the chips and guess what, those are supply constrained too. It's not a problem you can simply spend money at, it's a global supply chain problem with many disparate companies each with their own constrained supply chains.
- summerlight 2y agoYeah, I think Google should be actively working on addressing shortage. But I don't think this can be solved in the short term even with infinite capitals since ASML is the fundamental bottleneck and everyone is competing for the same limited capacity.
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- nikhizzle 2y agoA possible endgame of this quest for growth is just mixing unlabeled ads directly in with search content. Effectively pay for ranking with some quality filter. I'm pretty sure it won't come to that, but worse things have happened.
- dabeeeenster 2y agoLike this doesnt happen already and hasnt been the case for the last 10 years?
- akomtu 2y agoInjecting ads into the actual search results looks egregious today, but will be the norm later.
- jasonfarnon 2y agoFirst they'll just insert them among the results but--no need to worry!--"clearly" labeled as ads. Then the labels get smaller and smaller. Like Quora, yahoo news, etc.
- akomtu 2y agoI meant the actual search results will be mangled to show ads. And that's where llms come into play: they can merge a quote from wikipedia with a pharma-sponsored ad.
- amf12 2y agoLike this? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spam-bots-compete-to-sell-you-stuff/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/reddit-sneaky-ai-spa...
- oblio 2y agoIn many countries this would be illegal for classic media.
- ls612 2y agoUp 15% after hours on news that they will begin a large cash dividend and share repurchase program.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoCongrats to Googlers
- killjoywashere 2y agoOf all the people in this thread swearing they don't use Google, I wonder how many are writing their comments using Chrome (or Chromium, or Edge, or Brave, or Opera, or any other browser that uses the guts of the Chromium project)
- Liquix 2y agoEh, Firefox is blazing fast and readily available. Avoiding ReCaptcha on the other hand...
- psunavy03 2y ago"I don't use Facebook!" (goes off to check Instagram account)
- einpoklum 2y agoI'd guess only a minority. However, we should also remember that Mozilla's main funder is... Google/Alphabet, via a royalty deal for having Google be the default search engine. See, e.g., here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-google-keeps-paying-mozilla-s-firefox-even-as-chrome-dominates https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go... And while the royalties arrangement is not that old, Google was a main funder before that happened as well. FYI.
- christophilus 2y agoI use DuckDuckGo for search, Apple Maps when on my iPhone, and Gnome Maps when on my computers. My main browser is Firefox, but I use Brave (Safari-based) on iOS due to better ad blocking there. I use local markdown files for all of my note taking, and Fastmail for email. But I am aware that I’m not typical.
- fooker 2y agoFirefox is funded by Google. Apple gets billions from Google, funding quite a bit of their R&D. Most of the open source software you use including the Linux kernel has a bunch of contributors from Google. Going one step further, Google has a large hand in open standards for everything, from wifi to programming languages. I'm not saying you should avoid these, it's just interesting that you can take so many non-typical steps to avoid google and still mandatorily have them involved in all of your technology.
- shegerking2020 2y agoso much for all the google doomers. Just goes to show how unintuitive all of this things are
- advisedwang 2y agoGoogle has been doing stock buybacks for years. Why are they pivoting to also doing a dividend too? Does a dividend give a bigger short term stock bump?
- didip 2y agoSignaling that growth will be slower.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoBuybacks are useful for many reasons, but one is that theyre good for people borrowing against their shares. If a lot of people have borrowed against their google shares and now that interest rates are high want to pay back the loan without selling a dividend makes sense. Lots of other reasons too I think but much of it probably has to do with the change in interest rates.
- einpoklum 2y agoExtrapolated annually, that's about 320 Billion. Even if you want to normalize it by number of employees, it's it's over 1.7 Million USD/capita . Capitalism is nuts.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pm2222 2y agometa.ai and groq, even bing copilot work for me. Google usage for me has reduced a lot. As such I’m not optimistic about google’s search business.
- thehappypm 2y agoDoes Google monetize searches for code stuff?
- blobbers 2y agoLooks like all those $ that pushed down META are flooding into GOOG.
- FredPret 2y agoIt's going to take a long time for alternatives to make inroads into Google. There are lots of marketing dollars looking for a home, and Google is going to be one of the better bets for some time to come. They may turn into a zombie but they won't die for a long, long time. For example, cable companies still exist and have a ton of paid ads on them. Fox makes $3-5B in sales per quarter: https://valustox.com/FOXA https://valustox.com/FOXA Sinclair isn't doing so good but they're still selling in the hundreds of millions per Q: https://valustox.com/SBGI https://valustox.com/SBGI
- rvz 2y agoWith the amount of mindshare, infrastructure and over 90% of the search engine market share that Google has, it will take decades to even begin to challenge Google's market share in search. We've seen this with Neeva which is now no more. Perplexity appears to be no different and only appeals to techies and at the same time is already dependent on Google search for their results, according to The Information. In fact I can only see them getting shut down like Neeva or the case of Perplexity likely to be acquired. Amazon looks more of a potential acquirer for Perplexity AI.
- FredPret 2y agoThey'll probably never budge from the top of the search pile. But search itself may decline over time. The same happened to everyone from steam train companies to Xerox to cable companies. These guys are next.
- twojobsoneboss 2y ago“If everybody sees it coming, it’s not coming.”
- Moldoteck 2y agonot just this - most android smartphones do have google search bar by default, in some it's not trivial to disable it and most ppl are using it. This alone is a huge moat. Add to this a huge nr of chromebooks that children use in schools (and after them too since the OS is familiar) - default search for these is google too. Default ff search engine - google, default iphone search engine - google. Every time someone buys an iphone, google gets one more user automatically. Some may switch, but absolute majority will still use default
- walteweiss 2y agoOh wow, I didn’t know their domain name is abc.xyz, that’s beautiful.
- flask_manager 2y agoPersonally I use google more/just as much for product searches; stores selling X, finding comparison sites, going to the manufacturers page for a product. That and restaurants from maps. I use it less for information based searches, but that almost seems to be a win from an advertiser perspective.
- mehulashah 2y agoThe dividend is interesting. Why not spend that to further grow new businesses for Google? Is it signaling that they're not unfairly using strength in one market to take over another?
- hn_go_brrrrr 2y agoIt signals they're pandering even more to Wall St.
- thehappypm 2y agoIt helps add stability to the value of the stock, in simple terms. I think it’s good for a company like Google. A bad demo can crash the price 20%. That makes the dividend yield go up, which makes the stock more attractive. Plus, if you hold for years and years and years you get actual income.
- sidcool 2y agoEnd of the day, for shareholders this is what matters. Not what products were killed, how many people were laid off, what ethical dilemmas employees face etc. are a distraction for them. This is what it has to come down to. It's not wrong.
- chucke1992 2y agoThey really live or die by Ad revenue...
- ironfootnz 2y agoSundar Pichai, CEO, said: “Our results in the first quarter reflect strong performance from Search, YouTube and Cloud. We are well under way with our Gemini era and there’s great momentum across the company. Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, and our global product footprint, position us well for the next wave of AI innovation.” The only one mention, it's strong position across conservative approach. A must have for any large multi national company like Google.