The performance demonstrated the challenges of trying to maintain growth at the company and showed how Google must invest to keep that up. While advertising, rooted in the dominance of Googles internet search engine, has sustained Alphabets bottom line in recent years, that business isnt growing as fast as it once did.
Its employees have been unhappy with management, political conservatives accuse the company of bias and YouTube has been under attack for spreading misinformation.
It has invested in wooing corporate customers to its cloud computing services, branched into hardware with new smartphones, smart speakers and computers, and has continued to plow money into so-called moonshot investments like self-driving cars and cellular connectivity from hot-air balloons.
To build out these new businesses, Google is spending heavily to hire employees, invest in data centers and pay for marketing of new products like its Pixel smartphones.
Google Cloud is growing rapidly, but remains behind Amazon and Microsoft and it is unclear whether the business is profitable.
The most notable financial gains from Alphabets moonshot investments which it calls Other Bets are that they arent burning as much money as before.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet and Googles chief financial officer, said the company was spending to hire and also to add infrastructure in areas like development of artificial intelligence and cloud computing to support our growth.
Even though Google is facing regulatory scrutiny, Sundar Pichai, the companys chief executive, said on a conference call that he sees opportunities to pursue new business areas or make acquisitions.
Original article