Alphabet has been the top tech outperformer to beat for the year, with stocks gaining nearly 70% year-to-date and raising Alphabet’s market cap to almost $2 trillion, reports CNBC. Its performance has been head and shoulders above the rest of big tech stocks and reflects the largest gain the company has experienced since 2009.
So far this year, Alphabet stock has gained 68%; the next closest is Microsoft at 51%, followed by Apple at 33%, and Meta (formerly Facebook) at 23%. Amazon has recorded a 5% growth in stocks for the year, and, shifting to a slightly different industry, Tesla has gained 51% year-to-date.
Overall, the Nasdaq 100, which contains some of the biggest companies not related to finance, has gained 27% this year. Alphabet’s incredible outperformance can be attributed largely to how the company has thrived in the midst of the pandemic.
Alphabet acquires a great percentage of its revenue from the Google advertising side, which has been booming during the pandemic; with so many people working from home, use of its web and mobile search features, maps, and YouTube videos has grown. Add onto that the rapid uptake of Google’s cloud infrastructure in a primarily work-from-home environment, and the company has thrived.
Revenue for 2021 is anticipated to gain 39% for the entire year to $254 billion, according to analysts in a recent Refinitiv survey. It’s a huge recovery from last year’s 13% growth and is the fastest the company has expanded since 2007.
“Alphabet’s recovery from the 2Q20 COVID-19-induced advertising slump has been remarkable,” wrote analysts from Argus in a report in October. “We see continued momentum in the coming quarters as e-commerce and digital advertising have burgeoned with economic recovery.”
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