Yep, it’s quarterly earnings season again. Google are usually first out of the gate with their numbers, and as expected they dished the dirt yesterday on the absolutely obscene amounts of money they’ve been making across the board. However the announcements were marred slightly by Google not managing to match analysts’ forecasts.
Over the first quarter of 2011 Google raked in a cool $8.58 billion across all it’s myriad products and services, which is up 27% on the same period last year. However once Google’s operating costs (which rose 33% to $2.8billion) and traffic acquisition costs are taken into account the search giant’s net income for the period is $2.3billion, up only slightly on Q1 2010’s figure of $1.96 billion.
This was also the first quarter in the companies history that more than half (53%) of it’s revenue came from outside the United States.
Google also dropped some interesting figures about their operations and expansions. The company took on a massive 2,000 extra staff over the three months from January – which accounts for those increased operating costs. The search giant also spent around $890 million on new gear such as server farms and networking equipment.
Google also spilt some Android figures – the number of apps being downloaded onto the popular mobile OS has risen a full 50% since the end of 2010, with a total of 3 billion apps installed worldwide. Google also confirmed a widely-reported figure – 350,000 Android devices are now being activated every day.