Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) was more than 10% higher following better than expected first-quarter results. The stock has managed to hold onto these gains even with broad market and tech weakness over the last couple of days. Much of the strength was due to the coronavirus's impact on revenue in the first quarter being less than feared. Additionally, numbers showed continued growth over an annual basis indicating the resilience of the franchise.
Inside the Numbers
Google reported first-quarter earnings of $9.87 per share which was below expectations of $10.15 per share. Revenue came in at $41.2 billion in the quarter which was above consensus of $41 million. Despite the coronavirus leading to a "significant dropoff" in the last two weeks of March, it was able to achieve 13% revenue growth compared to the first quarter in 2019. That quarter, Google posted 17% revenue growth but it was in a much better macro environment.
So overall, the coronavirus seems to have a muted impact on Google. In the conference call, CFO Ruth Porat said they are seeing signs of ad buying picking up into the end of April, and the company doesn't expect the decline to be meaningful to impact its growth trajectory. Most of the weakness was in search advertising, however, direct-response advertising had much less weakness. YouTube advertising was also strong with $4.04 billion in the first quarter for a 33% growth rate compared to last year's first quarter.
The company is in the early stages of monetizing YouTube, and it's expected to be one of its growth drivers in the coming years in addition to Google Cloud. Cloud revenues were $2.8 billion for the quarter and grew 52% compared to the previous year. Compared to Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) AWS and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Azure, Google Cloud is growing much faster. However, its cloud division is smaller as well.
Google's Resilience
The better than expected report unleashed a flurry of analyst upgrades who were expecting a soft report as many companies were reducing their ad budgets. Additionally, travel websites are a big source of ad-buying which is obviously going to be impaired in the coming months.
And while there was weakness in this area, it was offset by strength in other segments. Additionally, the lockdown measures resulted in people spending more time online which led to more ads being delivered. The coronavirus is also having an even more direct impact on legacy media like print and display advertising which could already accelerate the shift to digital advertising.