Stock price when the opinion was issued
Some regulatory risks have now lifted. Still a decent valuation of 23x forward PE, discount to mega-cap peers. Continues to dominate digital ad space. Applying generative AI across the board. Cloud's a bit behind MSFT and AWS, but the entire space is growing so revenues are too. $100B in cash reserves gives lots of options.
It has been allowed to keep Chrome so that decision is good for the company. The legal system in the U.S. can't keep up with the fast pace in the market place, especially tech. The anti-trust laws were created over 100 years ago. Google hasn't raised or lowered prices and lots of it is free.
A 2 to 3 year timeline is the sweet spot for a long term investor. It is generally easier to form a thesis over three years. Acceleration is remarkable and no case has been made for a monopoly. Google can compete on the AI front and there is not as much focus on the search component. The value of the sum of its parts is greater than people realize.
Shares dropped 7.29% on reporting. It got punished for announcing spending of $75 billion in capex this year--punished for investing heavily in growth, which is a big change from last year. It ran up 25% since last September till the report, making it the third-best performer in the Mag 7. The quarter was mixed: slightly weaker revenue and surprisingly weaker Cloud revenue, but EPS and YouTube revenue beat. Growth slowed, but core advertising is still doing great. And yet Microsoft is spending $80 billion in capex, and Meta $65 billion. What has changed is the arrival of DeepSeek, which has changed the narrative around AI spending: Do megatech companies still need to spend a lot on AI infrastructure? Is the reaction to GOOG an exception or the new norm?