Parsing Google’s Other Revenues

Ever since Google became Alphabet and broke out its “Other Bets” as a separate reporting line, that segment has received a great deal of focus and scrutiny externally. But the fact remains that the Other Bets collectively contributed just 1% of Alphabet’s revenue in the past quarter. Meanwhile, a much larger “Other” reporting line – that belonging to the core Google segment – posted 12% of total Alphabet revenues, and continues to grow rapidly. This non-advertising portion of Google’s business merits a closer look.

The Fastest-Growing Part of Google’s Business

Google’s Other revenues are its fastest-growing segment, and likely a pretty profitable one too, in contrast to the slightly faster-growing Other Bets business, which continues to be massively loss-making. The chart below shows the breakdown of revenues for Alphabet in the quarter just reported:

As you can see, Google Other accounted for 12% of revenues, and that was up from 9% three years ago. The growth rate has fluctuated quite a bit during that period, but for the last two years or so it’s averaged just over 40% year on year. Meanwhile, Google as a whole has managed just 20% or so year on year growth during that period, with even the part that’s focused on selling ads on its own websites, including YouTube and search, only growing by around that same percentage.

Something of a Black Box

However, like the core Google ad business, this part of the company remains something of a black box from a reporting perspective: the company neither breaks out the component revenue lines nor the profitability of this business, so we’re left having to guess at them. We do know that the three most significant components of Other Revenue at Google are the various Google Play stores, its enterprise cloud services business, and its hardware efforts. Google has never provided any meaningful guidance around those numbers, but we can make some reasonable assumptions to arrive at decent estimates.

Other is Still Dominated by Google Play

Although there are three main components to Google’s Other revenues, the reality is that one still dominates: Google Play. That revenue segment – itself dominated by app sales – continues to be by far the largest component of Other revenues, with over 80% of the total, as shown in the chart below:

App store revenues continue to drive the lion’s share of growth too, following something of a stall in 2013-2014. Analytics firm App Annie estimates that app sales through Google Play in 2017 will hit $21 billion in 2017 on a gross basis, of which Google’s cut should be around $6-7 billion on a net basis:

That number continues to be much lower than Apple’s App Store revenues, despite being driven by multiple times the number of downloads. But it’s growing at a rapid rate – around 25% by App Annie’s estimate from 2016 to 2017. In addition to these app revenues, Google’s Play business includes other content stores, including movies, TV shows, books, music, and so on, with music subscription services likely one of the faster-growing contributors to overall revenues in this category.

Cloud is Finally Growing Faster but Still Sub-Scale

Google’s various enterprise and cloud services businesses have been around for years, but they’ve never contributed a very meaningful amount of revenue, though that’s starting to show signs of changing. Google still doesn’t break out the numbers for its enterprise and cloud business, but estimates suggest they are now growing rapidly, and other signals provide further evidence that Google is taking this business much more seriously since the arrival of Diane Greene to run the unit. Commentary on earnings calls – including the recent call covering Q3 earnings – indicates that hiring in this cloud business is a big component of overall hiring, which has recently been at record levels at Google.

Despite all that, though, Google’s cloud revenue continues to lag well behind its two major competitors, Amazon and Microsoft. Those two companies each define their cloud services business slightly differently, but Microsoft’s business has finally overtaken Amazon’s in reported size in the past couple of quarters following rapid growth this year. Meanwhile, Google’s cloud revenues remain a small fraction of either of the scale of the other two:

There’s certainly scope to grow that business more rapidly now that Google is really investing in it, and it’s had some big wins recently. But at the very least it will take years for it to approach the scale of its two big competitors.

Hardware is the Newest and Most Unpredictable Component

The newest and most unpredictable component in Google’s Other revenues is first-party hardware. Google has always reported sales of Nexus devices it sells through its stores in this bucket, and more recently has reported its sales of its own hardware there too, with Chromecasts the major driver until about a year ago, when it dramatically grew its portfolio. As such, Q4 2014, the quarter in which it launched its Pixel phones, its Home speaker, and its WiFi routers, was by far the company’s biggest quarter ever for hardware revenues.

But even then, those revenues were tiny – I debated including here a chart comparing two of the largest hardware businesses – Apple and Samsung’s – with Google’s, but the latter’s revenues wouldn’t even have registered on the chart in that context. Even Microsoft’s revenue from its Surface and Xbox lines vastly outweighs Google’s, at an average of over $3.5 billion to Google’s few hundred million per quarter. Here, too, of course, there’s room to grow in future, but for now Google’s hardware business remains massively sub-scale, something it will have to see to change in the coming years.

Margins are Tougher to Parse

I’ve provided you above with my estimates for revenue from these three major categories, but margins are much harder to discern. It’s likely that Google is losing significant amounts of money on its hardware efforts for now, especially with the recent acquisition of people and IP from HTC. Its app store, on the other hand, is likely highly profitable, though probably not quite as lucrative as Apple’s, given its larger scale and smaller revenues. Its cloud business, meanwhile, is probably profitable, but at a much lower rate than the higher-scale Amazon and Microsoft businesses, each of which is now contributing very healthy profits to its parent company.

Overall, though, these three components of Google’s Other revenues remain three of its most interesting and fastest-growing businesses, and arguably some of those most likely to drive growth and profits for the company in the long term, with hardware likely the furthest from achieving that goal.

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Jan Dawson

Jan Dawson is Founder and Chief Analyst at Jackdaw Research, a technology research and consulting firm focused on consumer technology. During his sixteen years as a technology analyst, Jan has covered everything from DSL to LTE, and from policy and regulation to smartphones and tablets. As such, he brings a unique perspective to the consumer technology space, pulling together insights on communications and content services, device hardware and software, and online services to provide big-picture market analysis and strategic advice to his clients. Jan has worked with many of the world’s largest operators, device and infrastructure vendors, online service providers and others to shape their strategies and help them understand the market. Prior to founding Jackdaw, Jan worked at Ovum for a number of years, most recently as Chief Telecoms Analyst, responsible for Ovum’s telecoms research agenda globally.

540 thoughts on “Parsing Google’s Other Revenues”

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