SAN FRANCISCO, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. on Monday announced a year-on-year increase of 17 percent of revenue to 36.3 billion U.S. dollars for the first quarter ending on March 31, 2019, compared to the same period of last year, but the earnings slightly missed the market expectation of 37.33 billion dollars.
Alphabet generated a net income of about 6.66 billion dollars for the first three months of this year, down from 9.4 billion dollars in the corresponding period of 2018.
Alphabet's earnings would have been 11.90 dollars a share, if it had not paid 1.7 billion dollars in fine for its violation of European competition law in its online-advertising practices in Europe.
"We delivered robust growth led by mobile search, YouTube, and Cloud with Alphabet revenues of 36.3 billion dollars, up 17 percent versus last year, or 19 percent on a constant currency basis," said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google.
Alphabet's earnings from Google's advertising segment, which consists of the lion's share of overall sales, were 30.72 billion dollars for the first quarter, slightly down from 32.6 billion dollars posted in the fourth quarter of 2018.
Cost-per-click on Google's properties, which measures the amount that Google earns for each user click, slid 19 percent on a year-over-year basis.
The company's hardware and cloud businesses, which are typically included in Google's "other revenue" segment, were 5.45 billion dollars in the first quarter period of this year, up from 4.35 billion dollars from the same quarter of 2018.
Google's "other bets," which often refer to projects in newer technologies and moonshots like its Waymo self-driving unit and the Project Loon internet balloons, earned only 170 million dollars but incurred an operating loss of 868 million dollars.
