After years of being among the elite group of the world’s most successful tech companies, a firm deeply admired for its innovation and rapid sales growth, and one of the hottest large cap stocks in America, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) shares have reached a point where they have underperformed the S&P 500 for over a year, and they have barely improved recently. Google, at least by Wall Street standards, has become ordinary. Arguments it will remain at that level have grown.
However, it is a challenge to tag Google as “ordinary.” Revenue last year rose 19% to $66 billion. Income from operations performance was much less impressive, rising from $15.4 billion to $16.5 billion. Management said stock-based compensation pushed this figure down. Another reason is the surge in employee count, which continues to rise in the thousands from one quarter to the next. Google ended the fourth quarter with 53,600, up from 51,564 at the end of third quarter.
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Google, critics would argue, has more competition than it did five years ago. First among them is Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). Facebook’s revenue last year rose 58% to $12.5 billion. Even at that growth rate, Facebook has a long way to go to reach Google’s level. Google also might be compared to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) financially. Apple’s revenue rose 30% to $74.6 billion. The comparison, many analysts would argue, is not fair. Google is largely a software company and Apple a hardware one.
The fair arguments against an improvement of Google’s fortunes are its troubles with regulators and the limits to its market share. Google may be punished for holding a monopoly in Europe, as Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) was more than a decade ago. There are also worries the same thing might happen in the United States. Google’s market share is above two-thirds in the United States and higher in some parts of Europe. Yet, its expansion in China, Russia and India are blocked by local search companies.
Apparently, the debate over Google’s future has tilted toward the skeptics. It will take something of substance for that change.
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