Google, which laid off more than 12 thousand people throughout 2023, spent $2.1 billion on compensation and other expenses. These expenditures were not cut in 2024 either. In the first month of the year, 700 million dollars came out of the safe of the internet giant, which laid off more than 1000 people. These numbers were shared along with Alphabet’s financial report.
Despite the layoffs, the company managed to grow revenues across most of its core businesses in 2023. The internet giant completed the last quarter of 2023 with a revenue of $86 billion. This means an increase of 13 percent compared to the previous year. The steady growth in the software giant’s digital advertising and cloud computing revenues also continued. According to CEO Sundar Pichai, investments in productive artificial intelligence were effective in this.
The search engine unit, the company’s main source of revenue, generated $48 billion. This means an increase of 13 percent on an annual basis. The revenue of the company’s subscription services and devices segment was $10.7 billion. According to the information provided by Sundar Pichai; YouTube Premium and Music and Google One subscriptions played an important role in this. YouTube’s advertising revenue also increased by 15 percent and reached $9.2 billion.
Addressing investors, Sundar Pichai described 2024 as Alphabet’s “Gemini era.” It is easily understood that this is a statement about the artificial intelligence language model that the company plans to run in all of its main products. “Gemini is the first realization of the vision we had when we created Google DeepMind by bringing together our two world-class research teams,” said Pichai, adding: “Gemini Ultra is coming very soon. “The team is already working on the next version and bringing it to our products, starting with Search.”
Google increased cloud revenues by 25 percent
Google currently ranks third in the cloud market, behind Microsoft and Amazon. However, it seems that the company is making progress in this area in 2023. Cloud revenues increased by 25.6 percent in 2023 and amounted to $9.19 billion.
The cost of layoffs to Google was not limited to just compensation. The internet giant, which closed some of its offices due to the decrease in the number of employees, spent 1.8 billion dollars for this in 2023.