Thomas Kurian, CEO of Alphabet’s Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco on April 9, 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google’s cloud industry reported an operating loss of $ 5.61 billion in 2020. It brought in $ 13.06 billion in revenue for the year.
This is the first time the company has disclosed operating income for its cloud business.
It seems that the losses of the unit increase as the company invests a lot in sales staff. The company said the cloud unit lost $ 4.65 billion on $ 8.92 billion in revenue in 2019 and $ 4.35 billion on $ 5.84 billion in revenue in 2018.
It lost $ 1.24 billion in revenue of $ 3.83 billion in Q4 2020.
Alphabet’s latest attempt to show that it’s serious about its cloud unit is to diversify revenue, which comes mainly from advertising, a business that was vulnerable in 2020 – especially in the second quarter. Google Cloud includes infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools such as Google Docs and Sheets, and ‘other enterprise client services’.
Wall Street is looking for additional financial details regarding the company’s cloud business, which pumped Google resources to grow, while being in a distant third place for the heavyweights Microsoft and Amazon. Google first began to break out of cloud revenue a year ago.
The company’s efforts to strengthen the cloud unit under Diane Greene, who left in 2018, could not gain much market share. Since former Oracle CEO Thomas Kurian came to Google to lead his cloud efforts in 2019, the company has continued to hire and acquire.