Google announced its fourth quarter earnings today and they’re pretty impressive. The company just slightly beat analyst expectations, reporting revenue of $14.42 billion for the quarter, which is an increase of 36 percent over the year-ago quarter in 2011. Google noted that this revenue amount doesn’t even include revenue from Motorola Home, which contributed $1.51 billion or approximately 11 percent. Factoring that in, total revenue is pushed up to $15.24 billion.
Net income for Q4 2o12 was $2.89 billion, meaning Google pocketed roughly 20 percent of the revenue. Net income got a slight bump from fourth quarter of 2011’s income of $2.71 billion. Q3 2012, the previous quarter, saw income of $2.74 billion.
Larry Page, CEO of Google, expressed optimism about the quarter and the company as any good CEO should. “We ended 2012 with a strong quarter,” he said in a press release. “Revenues were up 36% year-on-year, and 8% quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year – not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. In today’s multi-screen world we face tremendous opportunities as a technology company focused on user benefit. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at Google.”
An important figure in that is the $50 billion in revenue for the year 2012 — representing excellent growth of 36 percent — which is a significant accomplishment for Google. Overall, it was a good quarter and certainly not a bad year for the technology giant that started out as a mere Internet search engine.