Should Investors Consider Buying Alphabet Stock ?

28 Mac 2023

Alphabet's stock has risen by 25 percent from its 52-week low, but the emergence of artificial intelligence ChatGPT poses a real challenge to the company's search engine. However, investors may not fully comprehend the nature of the company or overlook the reasons to invest in Alphabet's stock. Therefore, they should take a macroeconomic perspective when evaluating the company.

Despite concerns about its position in search, Alphabet has evolved beyond its advertising-funded search engine, which helped it grow to its present size. With a growing interest in other parts of the technology industry, the company has been working for years to shift away from its ad-dependent model. It is worth noting that 79 percent of Alphabet's revenue still came from advertising last year.

Nonetheless, Google Cloud has become a significant source of revenue for the company. It accounts for 9% of Alphabet's revenue in 2022, up from just over 7% the previous year. Additionally, Alphabet owns numerous companies, including Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Waymo, among others.

While Alphabet allows most of these companies to operate under different brands and rarely breaks down the financials separately, investors should not be surprised if some of these companies become more prominent within Alphabet if advertising growth continues to slow.

If Alphabet's multiple companies fail to save it from an advertising slump, its balance sheet can. The company's success in advertising has made it incredibly wealthy, with nearly $114 billion in liquidity. Although that amount is down from $140 billion in 2021, the cash reserves give Alphabet considerable leeway.

Alphabet generates around $60 billion in free cash flow in 2022 alone, and therefore, even if some concerns about Google's competitiveness in search prove valid, Alphabet is still likely to generate revenue from various other sources.

Despite Alphabet's favorable macroeconomic outlook, the stock price has steadily declined amid a bear market in technology and a downturn in the digital advertising industry. The stock price plummeted to $83 a share, about 45% from its peak to its low, due to concerns about ChatGPT. Although the stock has recovered somewhat since then, it is still selling at a 30 percent discount from its high in early 2022.

Moreover, the price momentum has driven its P/E ratio down to 23, making it a cheaper stock than all of its mega-tech peers. Given Alphabet's macroeconomic situation, investors may have an opportunity to purchase its stock. Nonetheless, it remains uncertain when ad spending will recover, and ChatGPT poses a real competitive threat to the search engine.

However, even if Alphabet loses its edge in these businesses, the company has plenty of other investments and a cash reserve of $114 billion, which ensures a long-term recovery regardless of how the search and digital advertising business develops.