Alphabet Joins $2 Trillion Club

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 26, 6:35AM EDT

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Alphabet Joins $2 Trillion Club — © Drew Angerer / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction), helped by strong earnings, will pass the $2 trillion market cap at the opening of trading. The only companies ahead of it are Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) ($2.97 trillion), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) ($2.62 trillion), and Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) ($2.06 trillion).

Alphabet earned its spot the hard way. It continued to drive its key online marketing business, even though cloud computing and AI revenue helped boost earnings.

Revenue for the period was $80.5 billion, up from $69.8 billion in the same period the year before. Net income was $23.7 billion, compared to $15.1 billion last year. (See how much money Alphabet makes every minute.)

Alphabet also said it would buy back $70 billion of its shares.

Google advertising, which includes ads at its own site, Google ad inventory at other sites, and YouTube, surged from $54.5 billion to $61.6 billion. YouTube did particularly well, with its revenue up from $6.7 billion to $81.0 billion. Google Services revenue, including advertising and subscriptions, rose from $61.2 billion to $70.4 billion. Operating income for Services rose from $21.7 billion to $27.9 billion.

Google’s Cloud business was also particularly strong. It rose from $7.5 billion to $9.6 billion. Operating income for the division rose from $191 million to $900 million. “For years, Google Cloud was usually a weak spot during Alphabet’s earnings calls,” said Lee Sustar, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. “These latest results show that Google Cloud’s AI offerings not only got enterprise customers to take another look, but spend some serious money.”

Every one of Alphabet’s metrics was above expectations, which is why it topped the $2 trillion market cap mark.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.