Google’s Q1 2015 Earnings Miss With $17.3B Revenue, $6.57 EPS

Posted 6 hours ago by Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl)

Google reported its earnings for its first financial quarter of 2015 today. The company reported revenue of $17.3 billion and earnings per share of $6.57. GAAP net income for the last quarter was $3.6 billion. That compares to $15.42 billion in revenue and earnings of $6.27 per share in the year-ago-quarter.

Wall Street expected the company to report EPS of around $6.61 on $17.5 billion in revenue. It looks like Wall Street is undeterred by this miss, though. The stock is up almost 2 percent in after-hours trading, likely because it looks like Google is starting to get cost under control. Capital expenditures were $3.6 billion in the year-ago-quarter and are now down to $2.92 billion.

The company now sits on $65.436 billion in cash.

Google argues that its earnings took a $1.1 billion hit due to currency fluctuations and the rising dollar. “Google’s first quarter revenue was $17.3 billion, up 12% year on year. Excluding the net impact of foreign currency headwinds, revenue grew a healthy 17% year on year,” said Patrick Pichette, CFO of Google, in a statement. “We continue to see great momentum in our mobile advertising business and opportunities with brand advertisers.”

Besides the raw revenue numbers, there are a couple of other metrics that Google analysts typically watch for to gauge the company’s business. Paid Clicks, that is all the clicks on ads served on Google’s sites and that of its partners and AdSense members, increased 13 percent compared to the year-ago quarter but decreased 1 percent from last quarter. Analysts expected paid clicks to be up around 15 percent ahead of the earnings release.

The cost-per-click decreased 7 percent compared to Q1 2014 and Google’s traffic acquisition cost — that is the amount of revenue Google shares with its partners, were $2.432 billion, up slightly from the last quarter.

Lately, Google’s R&D costs have rapidly increased as the company ramps up its efforts to disrupt existing markets, enter new ones, and shoot for the moon. Google’s R&D expenses for all of 2014 totaled $9.8 billion, up from $7.1 billion the year before. Google hasn’t released its numbers for this quarter yet, but it will likely do so before the earnings call today.