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Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

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Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#91

Post by shermantanktop »

QuercusMax wrote: post #76
shermantanktop wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2021: Yay! Crazy hiring! 2023: What?!?! Laying off a fraction of recent hires? The world is ending!! Obviously this sucks for the laid-off, but…you don’t need a very long memory to put this in perspective.

More than a fraction of recent hires. I had long-tenured teammates (10+ years) who were let go, for no particular reason.

Sure, it’s not LIFO, and this churn can be a nasty way to get rid of the expensive oldsters. But as a percentage, the bigger companies are generally still well above 2020 staffing levels.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#92

Post by summerlight »

tra3 wrote: post #4

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

Short term revenue gain (2~3 years) can be all done by "optimizing" core ads businesses but that's not sustainable for a decade. The real question is how to build a longer term growth potential for Alphabet, and probably more than half of the employees are working on less certain business areas to figure it out.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#93

Post by voytec »

tra3 wrote: post #4

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

[flagged]

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#94

Post by epolanski »

Grazester wrote: post #79
matwood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

LLM is not doing anything given that Bing's growth since adding chat-gpt has been negligible.

You have solid numbers behind your claim?

By the way people are asking chatgpt or copilot what they used to Google. Not everything but a lot. I most certainly do and I think I'm not alone.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#95

Post by dieortin »

hiddencost wrote: post #68
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, those 8000 employees were producing -$10,000,000,000 per year.

A Google SWE costs the company around $750k average, fully loaded cost. So if those were all SWEs, $6B/yr isn't an unreasonable estimate.

Assuming those SWEs produced absolutely zero value to Google, which I bet is not true

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#96

Post by jsnell »

rdsubhas wrote: post #87
jeffbee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that is good news. You can look at it either as they slowed how much money they pour into the moonshots incinerator, or they stopped investing in potential unicorn lines of business.

I guess the point being made by that comment is, it could be an accounting / book-shifting trick.

That theory doesn't make any sense. Both measures are moving in the same direction (i.e. both units are becoming more profitable). If it was some kind of revenue shifting trick, the numbers would be moving in opposite directions.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#97

Post by TulliusCicero »

disillusioned wrote: post #22
Kluggy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.) The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any…

They've been testing in snow markets in winter at least occasionally for many years.

It makes sense to start with easier markets to a certain extent...though SF is definitely not an easy market in terms of urban design/clutter. It would've been way easier for them to follow up Phoenix with Vegas.

If they can handle SF, then aside from weather they can probably handle just about any other city in the US.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#98

Post by epolanski »

VikingCoder wrote: post #80
matwood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022) Right, they got $300 million less than expected. Which means they only got 99.544072948% of what the analysts expected. That means they missed analyst expectations by 0.455927052%. Not for total Revenue. Not for EPS. Not for net income. Not for diluted EPS. For the one category, Ad Revenue. Resulting in a 6% after-market drop. 0.45592705…

Missing 0.5% of your core business revenue is a bad sign for long term.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#99

Post by TulliusCicero »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #27
disillusioned wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.) The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any…

I always imagined Google licensing the tech as opposed to spinning up a fully fledged national taxi service.

I'm sure they'll license it out eventually, but if it only works in a few metros then it's too early. They need it working in more places for it to be worth it to license probably.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#100

Post by matwood »

VikingCoder wrote: post #80
matwood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022) Right, they got $300 million less than expected. Which means they only got 99.544072948% of what the analysts expected. That means they missed analyst expectations by 0.455927052%. Not for total Revenue. Not for EPS. Not for net income. Not for diluted EPS. For the one category, Ad Revenue. Resulting in a 6% after-market drop. 0.45592705…

Google revenues come from ~90% ads. It's an ad company.

The company gives guidance, so the estimates are not pulled out of thin air. Google should know their ad business very well at this point.

People selling after an ad miss is medium/long term thinking. They could be wrong, but was the miss caused by a wider economic slowdown (see UPS earnings) or was it Google specific? Either way, it could be sign of Google slowing down or the economy as whole.

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