Larry Page and Sergey Brin must be grinning from ear to ear. As Alphabet’s market cap has just breached US$ 570 billion; a good US$ 31 billion higher than Apple’s – for the time being. Stock go up and they come down so it’s too soon to tell if this will last long enough to be remembered.
Posting their 2015 Q4 earnings just today, stock trading allowed their shares to balloon to a gargantuan size. Apple posted the same result last week and they’ve shown that their dominance in the smartphone market has begun to stagger.
Insights from CNBC highlight that this is the first time that Alphabet (formerly Google) has snatched the title from Apple to be the most valuable company. We heard that the main MVP raking in their earnings was obviously Google, through their crazy ad revenue.
For the most part their revenue has been going back into R&D; a good US$ 3.5 billion in 2015 alone. They’ve placed big bets on their moonshot projects and its autonomous cars – that make absolutely no money until they’re proper realised. Yet while being in the red in their ambitious projects, the company still made a decent US$ 23 billion in the same span of time.
A reliance on just one particular product will always hurt a company when the market has (in some way) been tapped to oblivion. Of course, Apple being Apple will ride the storm and selling 74.77 million iPhones in Q4 isn’t bad, in fact, that makes some smartphone makers seem tiny in comparison. And do remember that Apple was valued at US$ 774 billion in February last year.
Page and Brin both deserve credit, so do other heads of Alphabet’s portfolio but they have to continue to provide solutions to solve the world’s problems – from search engines to self-driving cars.
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