The last time the market capitalization of Google’s parent company Alphabet briefly approached this milestone was in 2021.
Google spent the past year fighting two of the biggest threats to its 25-year existence — generative AI and increased regulation. The company had to adapt its products and teams to new challenges: the search engine changed, divisions merged, and eventually came up with its own large language model Google Gemini after an initial failure with the Bard chatbot.
Yesterday, Google announced its first-ever dividend payment and share buyback worth $70 billion. How notes The Verge investors appreciated these statements, and eventually the market capitalization of Google’s parent company Alphabet exceeded $2 trillion — and has been maintaining this level ever since.
Google is currently the fourth most valuable public company in the world, behind only Nvidia ($2.2 trillion), Apple ($2.6 trillion), and Microsoft ($3.0 trillion). Amazon is worth $1.8 trillion, and Meta — $1.1 trillion.
Unlike Meta, whose share price fell by 10% after Mark Zuckerberg said it would take years to make money from generative AI, Google says it is already finding ways to sell it, particularly to advertisers.
Google earned $23.7 billion in profit on a total of $80.5 billion in revenue, according to its financial report for the first quarter of 2024. Search and advertising revenue grew by 14% year-on-year, and YouTube advertising — by 21%; «subscriptions, platforms, and devices» grew by 18% — mainly due to premium YouTube subscriptions.