Alphabet soars after crushing earnings and announcing a $25 billion buyback
- Shares of Google surged more than 8% after the Alphabet-owned company surpassed analyst estimates and announced a $25 billion share buyback program.
- Analysts were particularly worried the tech behemoth's ad business would continue to decline, but Google reported 19% ad revenue growth, blowing past the 15% estimate.
- Watch Google trade live here.
Google shares rose about 8% in post-market trading after blowing past analyst expectations and announcing a $25 billion share buyback.
The company reported revenue of $31.7 billion, nearly $1 billion above Wall Street's consensus expectation. Analysts were also worried the company's ad business would continue to slow, but revenue growth of 19% surpassed the 15% consensus estimate.
Here are the key numbers:
Net Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs): $31.7 billion, up 20.8% year over year, and higher than the $30.84 billion that analysts expected.
Earnings per share: $14.21, compared with $11.19 expected by analysts.
Total advertising revenue: $32.6 billion, compared with $28.1 billion last year.
Capital expenditure: $6.1 billion, compared with $5.4 billion during the same period last year.
The earnings beat comes days after the US Justice Department announced an anti-trust investigation into "online platforms." The Tuesday announcement wiped out $33 billion worth of market cap from Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google.
