San Francisco (AFP)

Sundar Pichai, promoted to CEO of Alphabet in December by its founders, was undoubtedly hoping for a better start. Google's parent company released mixed results in the last quarter of 2019 on Monday, which immediately dropped its share.

Alphabet has also chosen to give a little more information on its performance to investors, whether for YouTube or for its offers in the "cloud".

Alphabet's turnover was slightly below expectations at $ 46.075 billion (+ 17% year-on-year), where analysts were hoping for $ 46.9 billion.

And operating profit also missed the target of some $ 600 million, to $ 9.3 billion.

However, earnings per share greatly exceeded what analysts predicted at 15.35 dollars against 12.74 dollars, according to Factset calculations.

But that did not change investors' minds. The action fell more than 4.4% at 00:30 GMT in the electronic after-market exchanges. If confirmed on Tuesday, she will leave the corporate club at $ 1,000 billion in market valuation.

"We will always favor a long-term vision," said Pichai during the conference call with financial analysts.

One way of responding to Wall Street that tends to focus on short-term results.

"Our investments in computer science, including artificial intelligence, ambient computing (voice assistants, etc, editor's note) and off-site computing, provide us with a solid basis for further growth and new opportunities everywhere at Alphabet. "said the new boss. Sergeï Brin and Larry Page gave him the position of CEO of the parent company, while remaining on the board of directors and at the head of a super majority which gives them effective control of the company.

- The Grail of the "cloud" -

But if part of the results disappointed, Alphabet responded to the pressing requests of many analysts by lifting part of the veil on the activities of YouTube, its video broadcasting platform, very popular with young people in particular, and its performance in the "cloud" "- delocalized computing - which is the new Grail of the giants of computing.

The sector is dominated for the moment by Amazon followed by far by Microsoft.

Advertisements and subscriptions on YouTube helped garner sales of $ 4.7 billion for the quarter and $ 15.15 billion for the full year, a jump of 36 % compared to the full year 2018, said Mr. Pichai.

He also welcomed the fact that subscriptions - not just advertising - boosted YouTube’s revenue significantly, to the tune of $ 3 billion in 2019.

We also learn for the first time that Google Cloud, which groups off-site computing activities, achieved sales of $ 2.6 billion over the past quarter, an increase of 53% ( $ 8.9 billion over one year).

"We are very pleased with the momentum we are seeing in the cloud," said Mr. Pichai.

Net profit from the internet search giant reached $ 10.7 billion in the last three months of the year, up $ 1.6 billion from the same period a year earlier.

In total, for the whole of the financial year 2019, Alphabet generated a turnover of almost 162 billion dollars for a net profit of 34.3 billion dollars.

- 2020 -

Both Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat have also suggested that Alphabet will continue to invest heavily, even if the company promises to be discerning about more peripheral activities.

The new CEO has detailed "four key areas" for fiscal year 2020: creating the most useful products, improving privacy and user security, better interaction and integration of resources, and also creating value on the long term.

"We intend to increase our investments in 2020 in both the technical infrastructure and our offices compared to 2019," warned Ms. Porat.

These investments will be focused on machine learning in all of our activities, as will the cloud, the search engine, advertisements and YouTube, said the CFO.

The number of employees will climb at a rate "a little more" even higher than the 20% growth in 2019, she added.

In addition to recruitments to support priority investments, the acquisition of Fitbit, the brand of portable connected products acquired in November 2019 for $ 2.1 billion, will also increase the number of Alphabet employees.

© 2020 AFP