One of the few things to be issued by Google in non-beta form: its financial results. And they make pleasant reading for company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and indeed all those stockholders who invested in the floatation of the search giant.
With profits totalling $381m, the company has reported record revenues of $1.578bn for the third quarter ending September 30, a 96 per cent increase on the same period in 2004.
‘Although this is typically a slower season for Internet properties, we had another exceptional quarter,’ said Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. ‘Our focus on end users and on quality of information and advertising worldwide continues to work extremely well. We are very pleased with how well this is working at scale.’
According to its own website, ‘Google is the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine’. That may or may not be true, but the company is certainly turning searches into dollars. Google Network Revenues, which covers the AdSense revenues generated on partner sites, amounted to $675m, or 43 per cent of total revenues. This represents a 7 per cent sequential increase. Google-owned sites themselves generated $885m, 56 per cent of total revenues, which is a 20 per cent increase over the second quarter. The company also reported spending $151m on research and development.
The results exceeded Wall Street expectations according to The New Times, which reported Google’s shares hitting a record high of $335 in after-hours trading.
In the same period one year ago – in what represented Google’s first results since going public – it reported revenues of $805.9 million for the quarter and net income of $52m. These figures included, however, the impact of a settlement with Yahoo!, with the patent dispute being resolved with a payment to the tune of $201m.
Of course, Google is looking to go IPO one more time. Back in August it announced a second stock offering designed to raise a further $4bn of funding. In a quirk typical of the company, the number of shares to be sold is 14,159,265, which corresponds with the first eight numbers after the decimal point in the value of pi.
For those after the full financial figures, you can download a PDF of the results from the Google website.
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