While we expected the global supply chain issues to drag down the overall revenue of many companies, most tech giants actually earned an all-time high amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Among such companies is Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which reported annual revenue of $257 billion for the year 2021.
The company reported a 41 percent year-over-year growth to $257 billion, marking the first time Alphabet surpassed the $200 billion mark. In the fourth quarter alone, Google earned $75.3 billion, a 32 percent increase over the same period last year. Previously in 2020, Google had earned $183 billion in annual revenue.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement:
Q4 saw ongoing strong growth in our advertising business, which helped millions of businesses thrive and find new customers, a quarterly sales record for our Pixel phones despite supply constraints, and our Cloud business continuing to grow strongly,
The “Google other” category which includes the company’s smart home products as well as the Android operating system brought in $8.16 billion in revenue in Q4.
In the same quarter, while other tech giants like Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, and Youtube lost nearly $10 billion in revenue owing to the new iOS settings that affected many advertisers’ ability to target ads to users, Google generated advertising revenue of $61.24 billion and even bought in $8.63 billion revenue from Youtube ads in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The company also posted an operating loss of $890 million on its Cloud segment on revenue of $5.54 billion, while its Other Bets segment, which includes autonomous vehicle division Waymo and life sciences division Verily, earned $181 million in revenue.
Recently, the company has also announced a 20-for-1 stock split that will take effect in July. The stock split will give $0.001 for each share of the company’s Class A stock, Class B stock, and Class C stock.