Technology

Google Beats the Alphabet Soup on Earnings

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), you know it as Google, has reported its third quarter earnings for 2015. The search giant and maker of other great things reported that its adjusted earnings from operations was $7.35 per share on revenue growth of 13% to $18.68 billion. Thomson Reuters had estimates for the “GOOGL” shares as $7.21 in earnings per share and $18.53 billion in revenue.

Google did show that its traffic acquisition costs (TAC) was $3.566 billion versus $3.348 billion a year ago. Also, the company said that had foreign exchange rates remained constant from year ago its third quarter revenues would have been $1.291 billion higher with a constant currency growth rate of 21% year over year.

The gains were tied in part to contributions from YouTube and programmatic advertising. If you want to know how much the GAAP vs. non-GAAP really is here, that is GAAP EPS of $5.73 vs. $7.35 EPS non-GAAP.

Aggregate paid clicks rose by 23% from a year ago and were up 6% sequentially. Paid clicks on Google sites rose 25% from a year ago and rose 7% sequentially. Members’ network sites paid clicks were down 5% from last year and flat sequentially, but the aggregate cost per click was down 11% from a year ago and down 1% sequentially.

Alphabet has further authorized a $5.1 billion share buyback. It has plenty of cash — some $72.767 billion worth of it. Another issue is the headcount, which rose to 59,976 from 51,564 a year ago.

Google, or Alphabet, shares closed up 1.4% at $681.14 and shares were initially up 10% at $753.36 in the after-hours reaction. That is versus a 52-week range of $490.91 to $713.33. Its consensus analyst price target was listed as $773.84 going into the earnings report.

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