Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2013 Results | Hacker News Reader

Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2013 Results

investor.google.com

55 pointstilt37 comments

Too bad they dont break down the 'other' category. It has doubled YoY and now constitutes 10% of the income.

It should be iinteresting to find out how many Google Apps clients there are. Or how much the Play Market grosses. Although we have a good picture of the latter through other sources.

Man that is a ton of money. Per my earlier comment on Bing's growth (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111557) their CPC was down 2% from last quarter versus 2.9% predicted on a straight revenue grab.

They spent $2B on new machines and data centers and still put $3B in the bank. Amazing.

A PC in business really needs to be replaced in about 3 years due to upgrades/wear/tear. I wonder how long Google servers kept before they are replaced.

Not quite. 5 years is more typical. Upgrading after 3 years instead of 5 allows the organisation to sell the PC rather than bin it, meaning it gets to get back some CAPEX.

apple had 40 billion more revenue, and 10 billion more profit. THAT is a ton of money.

Only so many people need iPhones/iPads. People are going to need to be matched with goods/services until the death of the species.

Apple sells more than iPhones and iPads, they also make desktop and laptop computers, and they are also the biggest music distributor in the world, Apple isn't limited to hardware, and the majority of people who own iPhones (or, at least the majority of people I know that own iPhones) have purchased multiple iPhones, and will continue to upgrade because of planned obsolescence.

> they also make desktop and laptop computers

Sales numbers of these devices continue to plummet. They'll still be bought, for sure, but not in the numbers of years gone by.

> and they are also the biggest music distributor in the world

Again, not going to last forever.

Wait, we're going to stop listening to music? I can see plenty of arguments for Apple falling, but that is not one of them.

I don't see many people under 30 paying for music. And its only going to continue to get easier to share entire libraries.

APPL Q4 Revenue: $37.5B (Net: $7.5B) MSFT Q4 Revenue: $24.5B (Net: $6.56B) GOOG Q4 Revenue: $16.9B (Net: $3.4B)

HN collapses single line breaks:

AAPL Q4 Revenue: $37.5B (Net: $7.5B)

MSFT Q4 Revenue: $24.5B (Net: $6.56B)

GOOG Q4 Revenue: $16.9B (Net: $3.4B)

Also corrected Apple stock symbol.

The corresponding AAPL quarter for the same timeframe would be AAPL's Q1 2014 results from this week, no? Which would be $57.6B (Net: $13.1B)

Apple is much more cyclical than Google or Microsoft. They get a much larger boost from the holiday season.

So you should look not only at Q1, or at Q4, but at all four quarters.

AAPL earnings for quarters ending:

  2012-12-29    $13.078 billion
  2013-03-30    $ 9.547 billion
  2013-06-29    $ 6.900 billion
  2013-09-28    $ 7.512 billion
  2013-12-28    $13.072 billion

You are comparing the wrong quarters, you should use AAPL's 2014 Q1 number, which just came out a few days ago.

AAPL EPS - 14.50 GOOG EPS - 12.01

AAPL goes down 8% to 500 GOOG goes up 4% to 1182

I love Google and it is a great business, but for the life of me I can't understand how they get a 30 PE and Apple gets an 8 PE.

It all about future growth and not what is happening right now.

I think the "future" should be quantified, since infinitely far in the future, who knows?

So, let's say 10 years (the number is arbitrary). If we take the "future" to be in 10 years, that would mean that investor think Google's value will increase by almost 4x while Apple's value stays stagnant (no growth at all).

Either that or they think Google will be stagnant, and Apple will fall by almost 4x.

Or of course, somewhere in the middle. The point is, "the future" isn't well-defined, and it makes businesses like Amazon get to hand wave each quarter.

Cost per click continues its decline. How many quarters is that now? 8 or 9?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

I'm not too smart, you're going to have to explain the relevance of that to my comment.

Consider these hypothetical numbers:

2012: 1 million desktop clicks at $1 each + 100,000 mobile clicks at 10 cents each = $1,010,000 total cash, or 0.918 dollars per click, overall.

2013: 1.5 million desktop clicks at $1.10 each + 2 million mobile click at 20 cents each = $2,050,000 total cash, or 0.586 dollars per click.

Overall clicks went up. Mobile clicks went up. Desktop clicks went up. Overall cash went up. Mobile cost per click went up. Desktop cost per click went up. Everything's great!

Except if you're just looking at overall cost per click, it looks terrible.

The best example of this I can think of here is desktop and mobile clicks. Mobile clicks have historically had vastly lower CPCs than desktop and are increasing in quantity faster than desktop clicks, but I can easily believe that both mobile and desktop CPCs are individually going up.

Except you'd really want to figure out the confounding influence. The GP is correct, that Google's CPC has gone down for 10 of the last 12 quarters. It is reported in the quarterly earnings as a total across all clicks (which may be why you think the paradox applies) but by comparing revenue from properties and sites one can deduce that in this case it actually reflects that Google's ads are becoming less and less valuable. That has been more than made up for though by Google increasing their "inventory" which they can do up to AltaVista levels if they choose, but that gets another paradox going which is Ad fatigue. My read of their results over the last 3 years makes a pretty compelling case that the Ad business peaked 4 years ago and has been fading ever since.

sciwiz, you are hellbanned, no one can see your comments unless they log in and turn on "showdead"

I don't think that's true unless it just started with this most recent comment. I check sciwiz other comments and they aren't dead. Might've just been this comment that was killed.

There are two dead submissions as well.

The culprit appears to be his submission from shinetech.com. It appears to have been banned 3 months ago, after being submitted mostly by a single user or others with low karma, and most receiving 2 votes, which probably set off the voting ring detector.

sciwiz, send the admins a note at info@ycombinator.com explaining that you think you got caught up as a false positive, then be careful submitting things from smaller blogs for a while.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=theverge.com#!/story/sort_by_date/...

I hope Tim Cook is watching this. Google missed earnings and the stock WENT UP. Investors love that they're trying new things and are doing everything they can to grow. On the other hand, Apple is trying to horde as much cash as possible while sandbagging their products. Given the resources he has as the CEO of Apple, I don't think anyone's impressed by his ability to make money. It's almost as if he's sending the message that they got lucky with smartphones and tablets..so venturing out to new product categories is too risky to pursue aggressively.

Google's stock went up despite - not because - "they're trying new things and are doing everything they can to grow". The real reason the stock went up was because their core ad business is healthy and can support whatever crazy side projects they do.

You have way too much respect for the wall st folks if you think the short term stock price is rational in any meaningful way. Remember the original iPhone announcement that blowed everyone away? AAPL went down after that.

Apple|MS|Samsung|Intel and who ever else is sitting on tons of cash need to use Google's tactics of free everything(os,browser,video,docs,mail etc) against Google if they ever want to seriously compete with them. The ideal open neutralizer of Google would be an Open Search Index with unlimited API access. If that doesn't happen soon Google has all the data and its Game Over. You can see this already with their speech recognizers and image recognizer.

So they mentioned approving stock as a dividend for shareholders... does that imply a split? Did anyone see where they specified a split ratio?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/google-poised-exe...

Can anyone shed some lights on how do they calculate Goodwill?

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding of goodwill is that it is calculated as the difference between the net asset value of an acquired company and its acquisition price; that is, Google buys Motorola for $12bb, net value of all Motorola's assets is say $8bb, then goodwill increments by $4bb.

Correct, then you typically write it off as a cost over a number of years

Goodwill is actually tested for impairment. Although it is generally amortized for valuation purposes.

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