Alphabet and Microsoft released second-quarter 2021 revenue numbers on Tuesday. Both experienced a major leap in the numbers.
Alphabet released Q2 2021 earnings Tuesday, reporting that revenue jumped 62% to $61.88 billion. This represents the company’s largest percentage jump in quarterly sales in about 14 years.
“Our strong second-quarter revenues of $61.9 billion reflect elevated consumer online activity and broad-based strength in advertiser spend,” Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said in a statement.
Porat did caution during the company's earnings conference call that the remainder of the year could be somewhat muted.
Google’s Search and Other brought in $35.8 billion -- up from $21.3 billion. The number reflects a comparison to 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies pulled back on advertising, but the ad company still did well. YouTube helped to boost revenue regardless of the pandemic.
YouTube’s revenue rose more than 83% to about $7 billion. The rise was driven partly by the video platform’s Shorts product, which “surpassed 15 billion global daily views,” up 131% from the 6.5 billion global daily views that it detailed in March.
The Google network generated $7.5 billion, up from $4.7 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Google Cloud reported revenue of $4.6 billion, up from $3 billion in Q2 2020.
The growth rate is slightly above what Microsoft posted for Azure, its cloud unit, despite that the Redmond, Washington, company beat expectation on growth.
Microsoft reported that revenue rose 21% to $46.15 billion in the second quarter.
Revenue from Azure, which competes with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, grew 51% in the quarter.
The company’s Personal Computing segment, which includes Windows, gaming and search advertising rose 9% to generate $14.09 billion.
Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment -- which includes Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, and GitHub -- rose 30% from the prior year to reach revenue of $17.38 billion.
The Productivity and Business Processes unit, which contains Office software Dynamics, and LinkedIn, contributed $14.69 billion.