The search giant’s historic strength is in algorithms, which is the very foundation of AI. Though Google Cloud is perennially a distant third in the cloud market, its platform is a natural conduit to offer AI services to customers. Demonstrating its competitive focus on AI, Google rolled out the AI platform Bard soon after OpenAI debuted ChatGPT. It’s a safe bet that Google will be a leader in AI in the years ahead.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational founded in 2015 in California, United States, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, by restructuring the famous search engine Google. The company, which is currently one of the world’s largest tech conglomerates, has made about 200 acquisitions over the last 2 decades, expanding its focus from Google’s advertising business to other businesses, including healthcare, robotics, telecommunication, media and entertainment, payments, cloud, auto tech, and navigation, among others.
Some of the most popular subsidiaries of the company include Google, Fitbit, Waymo, Wing, Google Fiber, GV, Verily, DeepMind, Sidewalk Labs, CapitalG, and Calico. Alphabet categories these holdings as ‘Other Bets’, which contributed nearly 2.8% to the company’s revenue in 2021 Q3. In total, Alphabet posted revenue of $65 billion in the third quarter of the 2021 fiscal year, embarking on an upward movement of 44% from the last fiscal. In the US, the company has its stocks listed on the NASDAQ in 2 classes – Class A (GOOGL) and Class C (GOOG).
The Class A shares are meant for investors who are provided with 1 voting right per share, whereas the Class C shares are generally held by employees without voting rights. Google garners as much as 99% of Alphabet’s revenue, and a significant contributor is its advertising business.
Other avenues of revenue for the company include the sale of content and apps on YouTube and Google Play and the sale of hardware such as ChromeBook, Pixel Smartphones, and Smart Home Gadgets. The company also generates revenue via fees received for subscription-based products such as YouTube TV and YouTube Premium.
