The past quarter has definitely been an eventful one for Google. The company has released its highly acclaimed mobile operating system Android 5.0 Lollipop, it’s announced an ambitious plan to expand its Google Fiber service to four new markets and decided to shift responsibility for Google Glass over to Nest founder Fadell. But was this eventful quarter as profitable as analysts had hoped?
RELATED: 5 reasons Google’s move to become a wireless carrier may be doomed to fail
The consensus estimate for its fourth quarter 2014 earnings was earnings of $7.08 per share on revenues of $14.76 billion. The company missed these expectations, however, and instead posted earnings of $6.88 per share on revenues of $14.48 billion.
Google also saw its cost-per-click — a key metric used to determine how much money Google can charge for advertisements — decrease by 3% year-over-year from Q4 2013. This has been a long-term concern for Google because its cost-per-click numbers have been steadily trending downward for some time now.
And here’s a really mind-blowing fact: Google’s revenue for all of FY 2014 was $66 billion, while Apple’s revenue for the holiday quarter alone was an astonishing $74.5 billion. This means that it took Apple just three months to generate more revenue than Google generated in an entire year.
