Alphabet Earnings: Another Strong Quarter Expected

Investors will be looking closely at advertising and cloud sales.

Malik Ahmed Khan 4 February, 2025 | 9:46AM
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Key Morningstar Metrics for Alphabet


What We Expect from Alphabet’s Earnings

Alphabet GOOGL/GOOG reports fourth-quarter financial results tomorrow, Feb. 4, after markets close. While advertising demand is expected to be solid, partly as the fourth quarter includes holiday-driven ad spending, investors are likely keeping a keen eye on how Google Cloud revenue shapes up.

Why it matters: We see fellow ad giant Meta’s strong fourth-quarter earnings, reported last week, as a good omen for Alphabet’s advertising sales. Beyond advertising, we also view Microsoft’s strong Azure growth for the fourth calendar quarter as a good read-through for Google Cloud demand.

  • For the fourth quarter, we expect advertising sales to clock in at $70 billion, up 6% year over year, with YouTube the fastest-growing ad business at Alphabet. On advertising, we expect management to provide commentary on AI Overviews monetization and the impact on user engagement.
  • On the cloud infrastructure side, we expect Google Cloud sales to top $12 billion, up 35% year over year. We continue to expect cloud revenue to be driven by artificial intelligence-related workloads and are expecting some directional commentary on Gemini’s (Alphabet’s large language model) monetization trends.

The bottom line: Going into earnings, we reiterate our $220 per share fair value estimate for wide-moat Alphabet and view shares as marginally undervalued. We believe outperformance on advertising, primarily via AI Overview monetization, and cloud growth could drive upside to our fair value.

  • While investors have come around on the name, with Alphabet trading up 15% since the last earnings report, we continue to view the shares as attractively priced for investors seeking Big Tech exposure at a reasonable price.
  • On the profitability side, we expect Alphabet’s fourth-quarter operating margin to come in at 32%, up 270 basis points year over year, driven mostly by an improving margin profile for Google Cloud. On expenses, we expect Alphabet’s capital expenditures for the quarter to be around $13 billion.

Alphabet Stock vs. Morningstar Fair Value Estimate

Source: Morningstar Direct.


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Malik Ahmed Khan  is an equity analyst, technology, for Morningstar Research Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc.

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