作者：ConOR DOUGHERTY
来源：The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Ever since Google went public 11 years ago, investors have regarded it as a wildly successful company that made no secret of its distaste for Wall Street.
Perhaps Alphabet will be a little different.
In its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, Google, now called Alphabet, reported strong growth, but with a closer eye on expenses, and announced that it would give investors some of their money back by buying back shares of its own stock.
“They’re growing up,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Financial.
Google’s third-quarter revenue increased 13 percent from a year ago to $18.7 billion, and was up 21 percent without currency fluctuations. Net income in the third quarter was $4 billion, compared with $2.7 billion a year ago. Company executives highlighted strong growth in mobile search, noting that mobile search queries now outnumbered those on desktop, as well as in YouTube, the video site.
Google shares were up about 11 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday。
“Products like Search, Android, Maps, Chrome and YouTube each have over a billion users already, and Google Play crossed that milestone this quarter as well,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s new chief executive. “But what’s most exciting is that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface.”
Those numbers are the closing act for a company that we can now call “old Google.” The company this month reorganized into the holding company Alphabet. Starting next year it will separate the financial results of Google’s traditional search and advertising businesses from a dizzying number of appendages including, among other things, a pharmaceutical company, two venture capital arms and a project to build self-driving cars.
The third quarter served as a waypoint before investors finally see what Google’s core business looks like without long-term projects that aren’t bringing in much or any money. “This is the appetizer, and the main meal comes next quarter when they report the new corporate structure,” said Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities.
Still, investors got an early treat. For most of the last year, analysts and shareholders have been pestering Google to distribute some of its $73 billion cash pile. On Thursday the company announced that its board had authorized the company to buy back $5 billion in shares starting this year, a move that should add more life to a stock that has already had a recent surge.
Typical of a company filled with engineers, the buyback was encased in a riddle, with an exact value of $5,099,019,513.59, which mirrors the square root of 26, as in the 26 letters of the alphabet.
Larry Page, the Google co-founder and Alphabet chief executive, announced the reorganization in August, pitching it as a way to help the company speed up its innovation by giving individual companies more independence.
Whether or not that happens, the move toward more detailed disclosure — along with a more investor-friendly tone from Ruth Porat, the company’s new chief financial officer — has already restored vigor to Google’s stock price.
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The price of Google shares, which trade under the name Alphabet Inc. but still have the GOOG ticker symbol, are up close to 25 percent this year, in part because investors think Google’s core business will look a lot more impressive once the company breaks off the money-losing projects.
Alphabet has deftly positioned itself at the center of every major computing trend, including mobile phones, online video and the Internet-connected home, like the thermostats made by the company’s Nest Labs unit. But the core business is still inside Google and consumer-targeted advertising that runs alongside free services like search and maps.
The company continues to generate tens of billions of dollars a year from its original desktop search business and owns the world’s largest mobile operating system, Android. The Google Play Store, wher Android users buy games and mobile applications, generates billions in revenue, while the YouTube video site is poised to grab advertising dollars from television.
The main concern of investors about the company was that it could not seem to find enough new ways to spend money. But lately Google’s spending appetite appears to have waned. It still spent $3.2 billion on research and development in the third quarter, but the company’s staffing growth has slowed and profit margins are increasing for the first time in years.
The company’s relative austerity began under its former chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, but analysts are now giving glowing reviews to Ms. Porat, who has studiously courted Wall Street, a big change for Google, which has never given financial guidance to analysts before its quarterly earnings releases.
“If shareholders feel this is a privately run fiefdom and they have no say or vote you have only one way you can vote, and that is with your feet,” Mr. Gillis said. “And now they have people coming back.”
