On Monday, Alphabet, the Google holding company, will report its financial numbers in two parts — giving the world its first look at how much money its sundry futuristic ventures are making, losing and costing.
Here’s How Google Is Prepping Wall Street for Its First Alphabet Earnings
A look at what is coming for the Alphabet debut.
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This may be confusing!
To help Wall Street parse the earnings, Alphabet put out a cheat sheet on its investor relations blog on Thursday. Alphabet was created, in part, to shed more light on Google’s sizable spending on ancillary projects — like Nest, its smart home arm, and Access, home to its telecom efforts — and to show how lucrative its core ads business is once that spending is stripped away.
First thing to know: We’ll get some more intel on both of those things — but emphasis on the some.
Here are the six line items Alphabet will report for Google and for Other Bets:
- Revenues
- Segment operating income / (loss), excluding stock-based compensation expense
- Stock-based compensation
- Segment operating income / (loss)
- Capital expenditures
- Depreciation, amortization and impairments
Also, Alphabet will give segment information for each quarter of 2015, plus the quarters of 2014 and 2013.
But don’t expect much more minutiae beyond that. The company isn’t changing the way it reports for Google proper. It will report Google’s ad revenue for its sites and networks, along with the usual two metrics — paid clicks and cost-per-click — but won’t be adding line items for individual Google units, like YouTube, Chrome or the cloud business.
Nor will we see line items for each of the disparate, still-in-flux subsidiaries under Alphabet that aren’t Google. (For a review of those, visit our comprehensive Alphabet series.)
Still, there will be some fresh numbers from the infamously reticent tech giant. And Alphabet wants Wall Street to know that it’s doing this for them! “We expect the new Alphabet structure to bring increased focus, accountability and transparency to all of our efforts,” Amie Thuener, the company’s chief accountant, wrote in the post.
In return, much of Wall Street is giddy with excitement, expecting to see on Monday solid revenue numbers from Google Inc. and evidence of financial prudence from Ruth Porat, CFO of both Google and its parent.
Alphabet has a current market cap just short of $490 billion. In an analyst note on Thursday, BGC penned a bullish haiku: “Google is on track / to be the first company / to reach one trillion.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
