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| Alphabet continues to thrive despite the ongoing pandemic |
Alphabet, Google's parent company, set a new annual sales record in 2021 and showed no negative impact from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic or ongoing global supply chain issues.
For the full year of 2021, the company's revenue will grow 41% annually to $257 billion. The company reported $75.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021, an increase of 32% year over year.
"Our advertising business was strong and continued to grow in the fourth quarter," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. It has helped millions of businesses thrive and find new customers. Despite supply bottlenecks, we saw strong quarterly sales of Pixel smartphones. Our cloud business continues to grow strongly.
The company also announced a 20-for-1 stock split, which will go into effect in July.
The company doesn't usually provide numbers for devices like Pixel phones, Nest smart home products, or the Android operating system, and instead lists them under the Others category in the Google Services section.
The category of services also includes YouTube and search, two of the company's top performing segments. The other category had revenues of $8.16 billion in the fourth quarter.
Google's advertising revenue for the quarter was $61.24 billion. Apple made privacy changes to iOS last year that require users to sign in if they want to allow app tracking on other apps and sites.
Alphabet sets a new record in annual sales
Application tracking transparency affects the ability of many advertisers to serve ads to users. The Financial Times reported in October that Facebook (now dead), Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube lost nearly $10 billion in revenue in the second half of 2021 due to new iOS settings.
But Google collects its own data from YouTube searches and traffic. Therefore, it is less affected by iOS changes. In the last quarter of 2021 alone, the company earned $8.63 billion in YouTube ads.
The company reported an operating loss of $890 million in its cloud business unit on revenue of $5.54 billion. Other stakes, including its self-driving car division Emo and life science division Verily, brought in $181 million in revenue.
Last year, Alphabet's revenue topped $200 billion for the first time, nearly triple the company's 2016 revenue five years ago.