Alphabet Stock (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares moved into positive territory on Wednesday after the Google parent company reported first-quarter earnings that were better than anticipated and unveiled a major new stock buyback plan. These events occurred after Alphabet Stock declared that it would be repurchasing a large amount of its stock.
Alphabet’s stock price increased by 1.5% after the firm said late Tuesday that it had earned $1.17 per share, on sales of $69.8B, for the quarter that ended in March. The announcement caused the company to release its financial results. These results exceeded the experts’ expectations, who had predicted a profit of $1.07 per share on sales of $68.8 billion.
The corporation also announced that it will add $70 billion to its plan to buy its shares.
The income generated by Google search and other advertising increased by over 2% from the previous year, reaching $40.36 billion. This was one of the quarter’s highlights, featuring advertising sales that performed better than projected. Ad revenue on YouTube decreased by 2.6% from the first quarter of 2022 to $6.69 billion. Yet, the company could still beat the predictions of industry experts.
The findings show, according to Monness Crespi Hardt analyst Brian White, that Alphabet “is well positioned to capitalize on the long-term digital ad trend,” as well as gain from development in its cloud business and “innovate” with artificial intelligence product and service offerings.
On a conference call on Tuesday, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai said the company had “made good progress” in the quarter in developing AI language models and improving its AI services generally to “be more helpful to our users” and “empower developers, creators, and partners with our tools.”
Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs pointed out that Pichai and Alphabet showed “optimism” that their platform and product initiatives “will be increasingly driven by AI in the coming years” and that investors should expect to see “a recurring backdrop of deploying AI more broadly across the company’s product portfolio” at upcoming events like the Google I/O conference.
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Author Shariq Khan 
