Google’s parent company Alphabet is the first US company to cross the market valuation of $1 trillion this year. Overall, Alphabet is the fourth US company after Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft to cross the figure in the past two years or so.
The news about Alphabet crossing this milestone will come as a relief to its newly appointed CEO, Sundar Pichai, who was given this responsibility in 2019, after co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to give away their control of the parent company.
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According to reports, Alphabet crossed the figure just before the markets closed on Thursday. Microsoft was the only company from the US to cross the mark in 2019. Back in June last year, its stock prices surpassed the record after crossing the $1 trillion valuation mark on Friday, 7 June.
As for Alphabet, the company is expected to report its fourth-quarter earnings on 3 February, and estimates suggest it’ll be clocking a year-on-year growth of 20 percent.
Hitting the trillion-dollar mark doesn’t make a huge difference to the company’s investors, but hitting a new milestone, especially something like a trillion, does have its ‘cool’ effect and also makes them news-worthy.
The trillion-dollar juggernaut for US companies is unlikely to stop with Alphabet, and industry experts point out that social networking giant Facebook is next in line to cross the figure, probably in the next few quarters.
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Coming back to Alphabet, its main profitable entity, Google has been facing increasing criticism and investigations from authorities in the U.S. and Europe about its privacy policies and nature of its many-legged business. That will now fall to Pichai to wrangle and push through — though Brin and Page, both 46, have noticeably backed out of the spotlight already.
Although longtime tech analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies said he doesn’t believe Brin and Page are leaving “because the fire is getting hotter,” he said Pichai's role at Google has been preparing him for the increased government scrutiny.