'Strong fourth quarter' for Google

Stephen Withers
Monday, 25 January 2010 03:50

IT Industry - Listed Tech

If you're looking for signs of an improving economy, Google's latest results may be just the ticket.

Google's fourth-quarter results announcement headlined a 17% year-on-year growth in revenue. You'd certainly expect something along those lines, as many people involved in publishing are only too aware that advertising fell into a hole towards the end of 2008 when it became apparent that economic woes weren't going to be quarantined within the financial sector.

And while thing's weren't great by the end of 2009, the tap did seem to have been turned on again.

"Google had a strong fourth quarter, with 17% year over year revenue growth," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

"Given that the global economy is still in the early days of recovery, this was an extraordinary end to the year."

Well, "extraordinary" might be on the strong side if we were only looking at revenue, but what about Google's net income?

That soared from $US382 million in 4Q08 to $US1.97 billion in 4Q09. Surely that is an extraordinary result for an established company?

Organisations displaying Google's ads maintained their slice of the pie - see page 2.