Tag: Alphabet

Revenue up at Microsoft and Alphabet but ‘disappointment’ over Google cloud | Business News

Microsoft and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have both reported higher than expected revenue in their latest quarterly results.

Microsoft recorded revenue in the three months to the end of September of $56.5bn (£46.4bn), a 13% rise on the same period last year and better than the $54.5bn (£44.8bn) predicted by analysts.

It credited the strength of its cloud computing and PC businesses for the rise.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s revenue for the same three-month period was $76.7bn (£63bn), an 11% year-on-year rise and also surpassing estimates that the figure would be $75.97bn (£62.5bn).

However, its performance was still dubbed “disappointing” after its cloud computing division reported revenue of $8.4bn (£6.9bn) – $20m (£16.4m) less than expected. The figure also represents quarterly growth of 22.5%, down from 28% in the previous three-month period.

Both companies reported their results at the close of the US stock markets on Tuesday afternoon.

In immediate after-hours trading, shares in Microsoft were up 5% – while Alphabet’s stock went in the opposite direction, falling almost 5%.

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It comes as tech firms race to harness artificial intelligence (AI), in an effort to boost profits and increase their range of services offered to customers.

The results revealed that revenue from Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud unit, which houses its Azure cloud-computing platform, grew to $24.3bn (£20bn) – also better than expected.

While Microsoft is still developing many of its AI services, commentators expect Azure will play a key role.

The company has also secured an early march on its rivals by investing in startup OpenAI, owner of the popular ChatGPT chatbot service.

Jesse Cohen, a senior analyst at Investing.com, said the firm’s results “indicated that artificial intelligence products

Alphabet beats Q3 revenue and earnings, but cloud business falls short

Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) reported its third quarter earnings after the bell on Tuesday, beating analysts’ expectations on revenue and earnings per share, but a poor showing by the company’s cloud business sent the stock down in pre-market trade.

Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs for the third quarter, was $64.1 billion versus expectations of $63 billion. That’s higher than the $57.3 billion the company brought in during the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings per share were $1.55. Analysts were expecting $1.44 per share.

But Google’s cloud business fell short of Wall Street’s estimates, topping out at $8.41 billion in the quarter versus expectations of $8.6 billion.

Shares of Alphabet fell more than 6% following the report.

“I’m pleased with our financial results and our product momentum this quarter, with AIdriven innovations across Search, YouTube, Cloud, our Pixel devices and more,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. “We’re continuing to focus on making AI more helpful for everyone; there’s exciting progress and lots more to come.”

Despite the miss on cloud revenue, the company’s advertising business reported $59.7 billion in revenue, beating consensus estimates of $58.9 billion.

Google, and advertising industry rival Meta (META), are seen as bellwethers for the industry, so any negative performance could have a dramatic impact on shares of other digital ad firms.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif., May 8, 2018. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif., May 8, 2018. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

Google has been pouring money into its generative AI efforts after being caught off guard by Microsoft, which began rolling the technology into its products in February after investing in AI company OpenAI. Since then, Google has debuted a host of generative AI products for both its consumer and enterprise businesses, as it seeks to regain its standing as

Alphabet shares drop 7% adhering to Google’s A.I. occasion

Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks in the course of the Google I/O keynote session at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain Watch, California on May possibly 7, 2019.

Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Photographs

Shares of Google’s mother or father Alphabet closed down additional than 7% on Wednesday just after the enterprise held an celebration that promoted its new artificial intelligence chatbot called Bard, a person working day right after competitor Microsoft held its possess event to clearly show off new AI systems in its competing look for engine, Bing.

Google officially declared Bard on Monday, confirming CNBC’s prior reporting, and the firm reported it will commence rolling out the engineering in the coming months.

For the duration of the function Wednesday, which was livestreamed from Paris, Google executives talked about some of Bard’s abilities. The presentation confirmed how Bard can be made use of to display the execs and disadvantages of purchasing an electric motor vehicle, for illustration, or to program a excursion in Northern California.

Bard is run by the company’s substantial language product LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Apps. Google will open up the dialogue know-how to “dependable testers” ahead of creating it much more greatly available to the public, the enterprise mentioned in a blog site publish Monday.

The celebration also confirmed AI improvements to a quantity of other Google items, including Maps and Google Lens, which allows individuals look for for photographs from their phone’s camera.

The progress on A.I. is far beyond what I expected, says Vinod Khosla

Shares of Alphabet slid through the occasion, suggesting that investors ended up hoping for far more in light of developing levels of competition from Microsoft.

Google’s event took location just a person working day following Microsoft hosted its possess AI occasion at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft’s celebration centered all-around new AI-driven updates to the firm’s Bing research

Alphabet — Google’s corporate parent — to cut 12,000 jobs

Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. is eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or six per cent of its workforce, it said in a staff memo Friday, as the technology sector reels from layoffs and companies stake their futures on artificial intelligence (AI).

The cuts come at a delicate moment for the U.S. company, which has long been the leader in key areas of AI research.

Alphabet now faces a challenge from Microsoft Corp. in a branch of tech that can, for instance, create virtually any content a user can think up and type in a text box.

Microsoft this week said recession worries were forcing it to shed 10,000 jobs, less than five per cent of its workforce, and it would focus on imbuing its products with more AI going forward — a point Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai echoed in the memo.


Alphabet faced “a different economic reality” from the past two years when it rapidly expanded its workforce, decisions for which Pichai said he took “full responsibility.”

Pichai became Alphabet CEO in 2019.

Still, he said, Google was gearing up “to share some entirely new experiences for users, developers and businesses,” and the company has “a substantial opportunity in front of us with AI across our products.”

Major launch

The company has been working on a major AI launch, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. One of the sources said it would take place in the spring of this year.

Susannah Streeter, an analyst with Hargreaves Lansdown, said Alphabet’s advertising business, which underpins Google’s search engine and YouTube, was not immune to economic turbulence.

“Ad growth has come off the boil, a sharp contrast from the busy days of the post-pandemic reopening, which saw a surge in consumer spending,” she said. The company faces competitive and regulatory threats as well,