GOOGLE’S PARENT COMPANY, Alphabet, is now the most valuable company in the world.
On Monday, Alphabet released its fourth-quarter earnings, for the first time in its short existence. (As a quick refresher: Google gave itself a parent company last year so that it could separate its riskier businesses from the core earners.) These results today are split in two: Alphabet’s massively profitable search and advertising business (which includes Google), and its “other bets”—the so-called moonshots—which include Google Fiber, its high-speed Internet service; Venture and Capital, its early and growth-stage investing arms; and X lab, home to such efforts as self-driving cars and delivery drones; among others.
Whether it was smart for Google to split itself up in such a manner had remained to be seen until today. Now, it’s clear this was a great move. The company just reported a net income of $8.67 per share on revenue of $21.33 billion, up 18 percent from the same period one year ago. And that handily beat Wall Street’s estimates, of an income per share of $8.10 on revenue of $20.8 billion.
That good news sent company stock shooting up nearly 10 percent in after-hours trading. Best of all for Alphabet investors, this success means the company is now worth more than Apple—for the very first time in the history of both companies. Alphabet’s market cap is now about $560 billion, surpassing Apple, which currently sits at $540 billion.
Oddly, this also means that the most valuable company in the world is now one many people haven’t even heard of.
