Google earns more on mobile and YouTube but less on hardware

Google has seen its revenue and profit increase compared to last year, mainly due to good ad sales on mobile and via YouTube. Hardware sales fell as the Nexus and Chromecast products were end-of-life. The Play Store has over a billion users.

The quarterly figures released by Google were the first to be published under parent company Alphabet. In the past quarter, revenue and profit increased by 13 and 27 percent respectively to $18.67 billion and $4.7 billion respectively. That is converted 16.79 billion and 4.23 billion euros.

Sundar Pichai, the president of Google, attributes the growth numbers to increased ad sales on mobile devices and for YouTube. He said when announcing the quarterly results, according to the Seeking Alpha transcript, that there are now more Google searches worldwide via mobile devices than via desktop systems. Mobile search traffic is also increasing in emerging markets and India is now the country with the most mobile searches behind the US, according to the CEO. The number of monthly Android users worldwide has grown to 1.4 billion.

Pichai did not provide details about YouTube’s share of revenue. Google introduced YouTube Red this week, a subscription service for the video site. However, the CEO said that Google’s Play store now has more than a billion users, after the search engine, Maps, Android, Chrome and YouTube already crossed that limit.

Ads make up the majority of Google’s quarterly revenue: 89.9 percent. Hardware is still a small part. Pichai said a total of 20 million Chromecast devices have been sold. Sales of hardware such as Nexus devices and Chromecast accessories declined in the quarter, but Google attributes the decline to product line replacements. The recently announced new Chromecast, Nexus and Pixel devices will bring improvements, the company expects.

Finally, Google is increasingly focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence. These techniques form the basis for, among other things, the new Now on Tap functionality in Android 6.0 Marshmallow and the Photos app, which is said to already have 100 million users who have collectively added more than 50 billion photos and videos.