Google shares leapt 2.26 percent in one day on Friday, resulting in the highest fiscal mark to date for stockholders of the storied Web company. With shares (at the time of this writing) at $775.32, Google has bested its previous high point - met in October - by approximately one dollar.
Google's astonishing revenue increase of more than $3 billion from the fourth quarter of 2011 to that of 2012 is emblematic of such spikes seen throughout the tech industry this past year. Ironically, Google quipped to Wall Street analysts earlier this month that projected numbers for the company's near future were too high.
"A majority of Wall Street analysts who cover Google have not reflected the Home business as discontinued operations in their estimates," said Google treasurer and chief accountant Brent Callinicos. By this, Callinicos was insinuating that the Street number crunchers neglected to keep in mind Google's selling off of its Motorola set-top-box unit.
Callinicos' own projection for Google revenue in Q4 was one billion less than speculated by the Street, or approximately $11.4 billion. The actual number, in fact, clocked in at $11.34 billion.
The news of Google's achievement punctuates a notorious tension with the European Union over antitrust laws. Regardless of its having broken free from such legal woes in the U.S. last month, Google has been contending with the EU's far more rigorous antitrust regulations in an ongoing, three-year battle that analysts speculated as potentially deleterious to the company's overall financial standings.
However, according to CNN's David Goldman, Google can rest somewhat easy in the knowledge that it maintains 90 percent of the marketplace in Europe as opposed to the two-thirds it possesses here in the States. Goldman goes on to suggest further successes of Google's that may be reason enough for shares to soar:
- The daily activation number of Google's Androids continues to run past the million mark
- Google has found great success in its dipping into the broadband, cable, and wireless waters
- It remains "the dominant search engine"
- No threat is seen from competitors such as Microsoft and Facebook (whose shares saw a drop, at the time of this writing, by almost four percent)
Follow @profklickberg
