Alphabet Shares Move Higher on Earnings Beat and Share Repurchase Announcement

Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were rising on Thursday after the company reported second quarter earnings and announced a $25 billion share repurchase.

The stock saw a gain of over 9% after reporting an earnings beat for the quarter.

For the second quarter, Alphabet reported earnings per share of $14.21 a share. A survey of analysts per Refinitiv had expected $11.30 a share. Revenue at $38.94 billion was also ahead of the $38.15 billion that was expected.

Alphabet also reported traffic acquisition costs of $7.24 billion compared to an expectation of $7.27 billion according to StreetAccount.

Paid clicks on Google properties from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019 saw a growth of 28% while cost-per-click on Google properties from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019 saw a decrease of 11%.

Google’s advertising revenue came in at $32.6 billion for the second quarter, compared to $28.09 billion during the same period last year.

Other Google revenue which includes hardware and cloud products was $6.18 billion, compared to $4.43 billion in the year ago quarter.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s cloud business reached an annual revenue run rate of over $8 billion.

It was last quarter when Alphabet reported that Google had decelerating revenue growth and the company now faces the threat of antitrust action. The Department of Justice is reportedly planning to probe the company.

Pichai said on the company’s earnings transcript, “Q2 was an exciting quarter at Google. We made several big announcements at I/O, YouTube’s Brandcast, and Google Marketing Live. They’re all part of our broader vision to build the more helpful Google for everyone. When we say everyone, we mean users, developers, creators, partners, advertisers, and all the customers of our growing cloud business, and the communities we call Home. From the beginning, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we have evolved from a company that helps people find answers to a company that helps you get things done. Today, I’ll share how we are approaching this work. Building a more helpful Google starts with advancing our core information mission. In Q2, we have made a number of improvements to our founding product, Search.”

He remarked on the company’s new Go App and said, “Yesterday, we introduced the gallery Go App. It’s a way for people living in low connectivity areas to manage their photos and videos while offline. Google Photos continues to be one of our most popular and beloved products, now with over one billion monthly users, and we are excited by the potential of Gallery Go to bring these benefits to the next billion users. Building for everyone also means ensuring that privacy is equally available to everyone. In Q2, we announced privacy improvements to give users clear choices and more control around her data. We’re making privacy controls more easily accessible, expanding our popular incognito mode to maps and adding new auto delete controls. And we continue to challenge the notion that products need more data to be more helpful. For example, we invented a new technique called federated learning that allows us to train AI models and make products smarter without raw data leaving your device. To make products work even harder for you, we have continued to invest in our hardware business, bringing together the best of Google’s hardware, software, and AI.”

Disclaimer: We have no position Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and have not been compensated for this article.