By Canadian Press

Google falls short on third-quarter profit

Oct 28, 2019 | 4:47 PM

SAN FRANCISCO — Google parent company Alphabet reported mixed third-quarter results Monday, beating analyst expectations for revenue but falling short on profits. The stock fell almost 3% immediately in after-hours trading, although it later made up roughly half of that drop.

The company reported a profit of $7.1 billion, or $10.12 per share — significantly below the $8.7 billion expected by analysts polled by FactSet.

Quarterly revenue rose 20% to $40.5 billion — slightly above the $40.3 billion expected by Wall Street.

Alphabet makes the majority of its money from selling targeted advertising across the web, apps and Google products including its search engine and video streaming site YouTube. Investors are also closely watching the growth of Google’s cloud computing business.

“I am extremely pleased with the progress we made across the board in the third quarter, from our recent advancements in search and quantum computing to our strong revenue growth driven by mobile search, YouTube and Cloud,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.

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Google does not break out its quarterly cloud-computing revenues, but lumps them into an “other revenues” category with products such as hardware and Google app store purchases. Revenues for that category grew to $6.4 billion from $4.6 billion last year.

Google’s cloud is considered an important and growing business for the company, although it trails well behind competitors Amazon and Microsoft.

Alphabet’s Other Bets division, which includes long-term aspirational projects such as self-driving car company Waymo and drone delivery company Wing, reported increased revenue of $155 million but a growing loss of $941 million.

Google, along with other major tech companies, is the subject of multiple antitrust investigations in the U.S. The probes don’t seem to have affected its stock price, which is up more than 20% this year.

Analysts were expecting the company to report profit of $8.7 billion on revenue of $40.3 billion.

By Rachel Lerman, The Associated Press