The CEO of the company was in the Belgian capital on January 20, 2020.
The best year for investment since 2009, and the top-performing Big Tech stock of the year, is about to end for Alphabet.
The stock of the company is up 68% this year. It is virtually impossible for any of its peers to catch up with just five trading days left.
Microsoft is the leader. Apple has gained a lot of money, followed by Facebook and Amazon. For the year, it has climbed 51%. The basket of the largest nonfinancial companies is up 27%.
During the Covid pandemic and the latest bout of inflationary concerns, Alphabet has proven to be resistant. The explosion of remote work has led to a rise in business for the cloud infrastructure unit of the company.
In its third-quarter earnings report, which was released in October, the company reported a 43% increase in advertising revenue to $53.1 billion, and a similar increase in sales to $7.2 billion. The earnings beat analyst estimates.
While other ad-based internet companies were hurt by privacy changes to Apple's iOS, Google has held up better thanks to its control over the operating system.
Revenue is expected to rise 39% to $254 billion for the full year, according to the average analyst estimate. That would be the fastest growth since 2007, and follows a year in which the parent company of the internet giant barely expanded.
In early 2021, the search business began growing at pre-pandemic levels, driven by a rebound in advertising. The most significant growth of any social media app among American users during the Pandemic was seen on the video sharing website, according to the research center.
In a late October report, analysts from Argus wrote that the recovery from the 2Q20 COVID-19 advertising slump has been remarkable. The firm has a buy rating and wrote, "We see continued momentum in the coming quarters as e-commerce and digital advertising have burgeoned with economic recovery."
Twelve years ago, the last time the stock more than doubled, it was for Wall Street. In January 2020, the market cap of the company was $1 trillion.
Less than two years after reaching that milestone, the company added another trillion dollars. Its market cap was $1.95 trillion last week.
It is not just about advertising.
In the third quarter, revenue in the cloud division climbed 45% to $4.99 billion, while the operating loss narrowed to $644 million from $1.21 billion a year earlier. The cloud infrastructure market is still dominated by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, but it is benefiting from an emerging multicloud trend as big businesses spread their workload.
The investment arms of the company saw big returns. UiPath, Freshworks, and Toast went public this year. Investment gains for the third quarter were $188 million, up from $26 million a year earlier.
Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham is at the stock exchange.
Looking to the year 2022, analysts are more cautious and may need to find new growth drivers. Revenue growth is expected to slow down to about where it was before the Pandemic.
There is still no progress out of the other bets. The company lost a lot of money, but it made progress in new cities during the year. The smart city efforts of Sidewalk Labs, which was folded into Google, were not able to break out.
Gene Munster is on tech earnings.
