Google"s latest financial numbers were mostly on the good news side. Today the company reported that its earnings for the quarter that ended on March 31 totaled $2.89 billion, compared to a profit of $1.80 billion for the same period a year ago. Those numbers were ahead of previous expectations from financial analysts.
Revenues for Google came in at $10.65 billion for the quarter, a 24 percent increase compared to the same time period a year ago. Google also reported that it had $49.3 billion in cash on hand. That"s about half as much as Apple had but its still an impressive figure.
Google also announced a new two-for-one stock split which should please some of its shareholders. However, the new shares will be a new class of non-voting capital stock that will still give Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin control of the company. More information about the stock split can be found in the Founder"s Letter on Google"s website.
In today"s press release, Page said:
We also saw tremendous momentum from the big bets we’ve made in products like Android, Chrome and YouTube. We are still at the very early stages of what technology can do to improve people"s lives and we have enormous opportunities ahead. It is a very exciting time to be at Google.
The company did not reveal how many more people have signed up for Google+ in the first quarter of 2012, as they have in the past few quarters.