Google (News - Alert) has started off its new fiscal year on a number of solid notes. The earnings call started off with CEO Larry Page providing an intro. Aside from the expected plaudits for the usual Google revenue generators, Page gave a shout out to Google's sales teams, and pointed specifically to Google Now and Google Voice, calling the former Google's unsung heroes and the latter, two exciting innovations.
Fair enough - Google's business side never gets a shout out.
Interestingly, Page pointed out that Google's future is not about today's products and their evolution, but rather in revolutionary products. This particular perspective is in direct contrast to our own perceptions we provided in our analysis of Microsoft's Q1 2013 earnings as to why Microsoft is now an entirely evolutionary company that can no longer be revolutionary.
Page cited Gmail, Google Fiber and the company's driverless car technology as examples of maintaining a revolutionary edge. And of course, Page expressed great enthusiasm for Google Glass.
Patrick Pichette, SVP and chief financial officer, then took over the call from Page. Let's get down to the numbers that matter most directly.
For Q1 2013, which ended on March 31, 2013 the company reported total revenue of $13.97 billion, a solid increase of 31 percent compared to its Q1 2012. GAAP operating income in the first quarter of 2013 was $3.48 billion, or 25 percent of revenue. This compares to GAAP operating income of $3.39 billion, or 32 percent of revenue in Q1 2012. Note that Google reports advertising revenue consistent with GAAP, meaning that it does so on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs (TAC).
In the first quarter of 2013, TAC totaled $2.96 billion, or 25 percent of advertising revenue.
GAAP net income for Q1 2013 - which includes net income from discontinued operations - came in $3.35 billion, compared to $2.89 billion in the first quarter of 2012. GAAP EPS for Q1 2013 (which also includes net income from discontinued operations) was $9.94 per share, based on 337 million diluted shares outstanding. This compares to $8.75 per share for Q1 2012, based on 330 million diluted shares outstanding at that time.
Google revenue from advertising and other sources was $12.95 billion, or 93 percent of total consolidated revenue in the first quarter of 2013. The overall breakdown is as follows:
Motorola (News - Alert) Mobile revenue (hardware and other) in Q1 2013 makes up the rest of consolidated revenue for Q1 2013, and was $1.02 billion - 7 percent of total consolidated revenue. It’ll be interesting to see if Motorola Mobile will be able to make any headway now that Google has finally finished reorganizing the company, and can look forward to it delivering on the "mysterious" X Phone (News - Alert) project.
Google revenue from international sources outside of the United States totaled $7.1 billion in Q1 2013, and represents 55 percent of total Google revenue for the quarter. International revenue remains stable - in Q1 2012 international revenue represented 54 percent of total income.
At the end of Q1 2013, the firm had total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities of $50.1 billion. As with Apple (News - Alert) and Microsoft, Google is approaching the conundrum of what to do with all the cash. It remains to be seen though investors are not making any noises about it.
Worldwide, Google employed 53,891 full-time employees as of March 31, 2013. This compares to 53,861 full-time employees as of December 31, 2012. It’s interesting that Google had a net gain of only 30 jobs sequentially between quarters.
The Q&A end of the call was remarkably uninteresting. Questions ranged from core financial analyst numbers questions to such questions as how search revenue is affected by apps. On the latter issue, Page "isn't concerned."
There was one exception: one analyst specifically asked what Page thought of Facebook Home and how it might impact Google and Android (News - Alert) - which is something we've been pondering ourselves. Page simply pulled off a politician's response - "we've built Android to allow developers to build great mobile experiences." Yep, that was it.
And with that we'll call it a wrap.