Google knocks Apple off its stock market throne
Investors are celebrating the quarterly results from Google's parent company, Alphabet. Following a sharp rise in its stock price, the company surpassed Apple in after-hours trading on Monday and became the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
Alphabet shares shot up by over eight percent, catapulting its market capitalization to around 570 billion dollars. The market capitalization of the previous stock market champion Apple was thus overtaken, at least outside official trading hours.
Alphabet surprised the stock market positively with its quarterly figures. From October to December, the surplus rose from 4.68 to 4.92 billion dollars year-on-year, as Alphabet announced on Monday after the close of the US stock exchange.
Turnover increased by 18% to 21.33 billion dollars. This exceeded analysts' forecasts. The share price initially rose by over eight percent after the close of trading.
The figures were particularly eagerly awaited as this is the first annual report in a new Group structure. Advertising revenue from the core business of the subsidiary Google - which, in addition to the search engine of the same name and the mail hoster Gmail, also includes the video platform YouTube and the mobile operating system Android - climbed by 17 percent to 19.08 billion dollars compared to the previous year.
The Group surprisingly announced its transformation into an Alphabet holding company in August and completed it at the beginning of October. The new accounting method that has now been introduced has made it clear for the first time how the company is performing in promising business areas such as the robot car and internet drone divisions.
Last year, these experiments only generated sales of 448 million dollars and resulted in a loss of 3.57 billion dollars. (SDA)
