Alphabetthe parent company of Googlepublished, on February 2, its results for the fourth quarter of 2022 and its balance sheet for the financial year. With slow growthaffected by sluggish advertising revenues, the tech giant prepares its future with artificial intelligence.
Half-fig half-grape results
Over the past three months, Alphabet has released $73.3 billion in revenue, barely 1% more than in the same period the previous year. Over the full year, the American company generated $282.8 billion. A 10% increase compared to 2021, but still well below the 41% increase recorded between 2020 and 2021.
Alphabet’s net profit is $13.6 billion for the last quarter of 2022, down 34% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. Over the full year, the group posted 60 billion dollars in profit, compared to 76 billion dollars the previous year.
Several divisions lagging behind
In its balance sheet, Alphabet recognizes difficulties encountered by many sectors. Its advertising revenue reached $59 billion, down slightly from $61.2 billion in 2021. Search and YouTube are the two departments most affected by these slowdowns.
Conversely, the Cloud division achieved better performance with a turnover of 7.3 billion dollars, an increase of 32% compared to the last quarter of 2021. It even managed to reduce its losses which rise to 480 million dollars in the last three months of 2022, compared to $890 million in the same period a year earlier.
Despite its complicated results, YouTube continues to break records with his Shorts, its format of short videos thought to compete with TikTok. Sundar Pichai, Chairman and CEO of the group, indicated that these had exceeded 50 billion daily views.
Alphabet bets on AI for its future
For its future development, Alphabet takes the bet of artificial intelligence. The boss of Google explains (PDF) that ” AI is the deepest technology we work with today “. He is pointing out that ” our researchers, our infrastructures and our technologies ensure that we are very well positionedat a time when the AI reaches an inflection point “.
The mastodon seeks in particular to compete with OpenAI and ChatGPT with its own LaMDA language model. It plans to roll it out to the general public. in the coming weeks and months “. Alphabet also plans to use artificial intelligence to improve its products like Gmail or Google Docs, but also some divisions such as the cloud and online advertising.
