Yesterday, Google’s parent company Alphabet presented the first earnings call where it split out its financials for its two business groups: Google and Other Bets.
The Google group includes core businesses such as search, advertising, hardware, cloud, and apps. Other Bets includes newer efforts such as fiber rollouts, Nest learning thermostats, life sciences business Verily, and self-driving cars.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai made a point of calling out Google Cloud Platform: “Public cloud services are a natural place for us, so we established a business unit late last year to take full advantage of the opportunity. Our data centers have handled the workload of Google's own products from search to YouTube for 17 years.”
In November 2015, Google named Diane Greene, a founder and former CEO of VMware, to lead its new Cloud and Applications business.
Google plans to take its in-house cloud expertise and offer it to customers, in competition with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Pichai says Google Cloud is already used by more than 4 million applications.
The NumbersGoogle saw a strong fourth quarter with revenue of $21.2 billion, up 18 percent year-over-year. This represented the lion’s share of Alphabet’s total revenue of $21.3 billion, also up 18 percent year-over-year.
Net income, reported for only the parent company Alphabet, was $6 billion on a non-GAAP basis, and earnings per diluted share were $8.67 on a non-GAAP basis.
Other Bets appears to be a money pit for Alphabet. Because Other Bets includes a random assortment of business initiatives, Alphabet chose to only provide full-year 2015 financials. Other Bets' revenue was $448 million, up 37 percent versus the previous year, but it incurred an operating loss of $3.6 billion.