ALFHABET/GOOGLE:FUNDAMENTAL ANALISYS|PRICEA ACTION|LONG SETUP 🔔

26 Jul 2021

Praise be to Alphabet for looking beyond search engines and search-based advertising for opportunities. YouTube and its cloud computing services division have been hugely successful, providing at least some of the company's share gains in recent years. These businesses have also smoothed out potential fluctuations in revenue from one quarter to the next.

For reference, however, the company's largest revenue-generating business is still search by a wide margin. Both Alphabet and its investors need to make sure that this area remains a focus, even as the company expands into other areas.

Don't get it wrong: YouTube and Google Cloud are out of the picture. For the quarter ending in March, ad revenue on the former jumped 48% year over year as the platform became an unexpected destination for entertainment-hungry consumers during the pandemic. As it turns out, people like access to a universe of video content in a short format. Google's cloud revenues rose 46 percent in the same quarter as corporations resumed their transition to more flexible storage and computing format. Search advertising revenue grew only 30 percent year-over-year in those three months.

However, we shouldn't forget about the outlook. Search still accounts for just over 58% of Alphabet's revenue, down only slightly from the first quarter of 2020.

There are a few additional notes to the discussion.

Let's take traffic acquisition costs as an example. Google incurs the cost of directing people who use the Internet to its affiliate sites, where those users are then monetized in various ways. The company can adjust its advertising revenue to some extent by spending more or less on web traffic. However, traffic acquisition costs (TAC) are not constant as a percentage of search and related service revenue. Last quarter, the TAC level reached $9.7 billion, or 19% of Google Services revenue, up from 22% in the same quarter a year earlier. Sometimes, however, those costs can take a turn for the worse.

The main notable note, however, is the fact that while Alphabet publishes a detailed breakdown of revenue, it does not provide the same breakdown for operating income. All we know for sure is that Google Services - which includes search, YouTube, Android, and apps - is profitable, while the company's cloud business and "other areas" continue to lose money.

The good news is that the company's losses from its cloud business are clearly shrinking. At the current rate of progress, Google Cloud could even go from losses to profits within a year or so. The bad news is that while we don't know for sure if YouTube is a profitable venture if it is, it is unlikely to be wildly profitable.

Analysts and industry insiders disagree on YouTube's profitability, and their collective consensus broadly suggests that the company's operations are close to break even, though the average has a large standard deviation. Even if YouTube is indeed profitable, its revenue is still less than 14 percent of Google Services' revenue and less than 11 percent of Alphabet's total revenue. Indeed, if every bit of YouTube's revenue converted to profit (which it doesn't - not even close to), it would still be a minority of Alphabet's total revenue.
In other words, it doesn't make a difference.

Many investors are surprised to learn how little impact YouTube and Google Cloud have on Alphabet's financial results. That's the point of summarizing this reality in the simple charts above. And frankly, while both operating units are relatively small right now, they are both growing well and much faster than the company's traditional search advertising business.

However, if you are a shareholder, this visual analysis also shows the importance of Alphabet's core business. Profits from search and advertising have helped fund YouTube's expansion toward self-sufficiency, and it's still funding the creation of Alphabet's cloud computing division. Investors will need more proof that the time, resources, and innovation invested in the cloud segment of the company's business are indeed driving profits if Alphabet wants to remain as much of a cash generator as it is now.