Google had its first $50 billion year in 2012

$50,175,000,000: That’s Google’s bottom-line earnings for 2012.

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In a highly anticipated statement, the search/mobile/social/maps/kitchen sink titan revealed the grand totals for last year’s business, including $14.42 billion for the final three months of 2012, up 36 percent year over year.

In a statement to investors, Google CEO Larry Page said the results are “not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half. In today’s multiscreen world, we face tremendous opportunities as a technology company focused on user benefit. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at Google.”

In response to the earnings news, Google stock was trading at $732.87 as of this writing, down less than 1 percent for the day and up around 8 percent over the past quarter.

The company stated its GAAP net income for Q4 totaled $2.89 billion (up from $2.71 billion in Q4 2011); net cash from operating activities was $4.67 billion (up from $3.92 billion in Q4 2011); and the total warchest of Google’s cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities came out to $48.1 billion as of Dec. 31. The company’s full-time employee headcount includes 53,861 souls — 37,544 in Google proper and 11,113 in Motorola Mobile, with 5,204 employed by Motorola Home.

For contrast, Google showed a 25 percent year-over-year increase for the year prior, with $10.58 billion in revenues for the same period a year ago — around three times the amount reported by Facebook for the same time period.

As usual, most of the company’s revenue — a whopping $12 billion of the quarter’s $14 billion total, in fact — came from ads. According to research firm eMarketer, Google dominates the digital ad game, having collected around 41 percent of all online and mobile ad dollars in the country. This means Google has more market share of the U.S. online search, display, and mobile advertising markets than any other company, period. Also, Google cleans up in search ads, still the biggest piece of the digital ads pie, taking home around three quarters of business in a $17.58 billion market, eMarketer said.

The 2012 books include final financials for the acquisition of Motorola Mobility as well as accounting for the sale of Motorola Home, a Google TV competitor.

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The former deal was first announced in August 2011 with Moto shareholders giving the go-ahead in November the same year, only to see the deal hit its first regulatory stumbling block the nest month. While lawmakers expressed their concerns about the deal, a few hurdles were cleared in early 2012, and the $12.5 billion buy-out finally closed in May 2012. Now that it’s officially part of the Google family, Motorola Mobile revenues were $1.51 billion, or 11 percent of consolidated revenues in the fourth quarter of 2012.

As for the latter deal, which was worth $2.35 billion, Google told investors earlier this month that “financial results from Motorola Home will be presented as a separate line item” as discontinued operations and that Home-related revenue would be split between Google’s ongoing operations and the Home side. If the Moto Home sale had been included, consolidated revenues would have been $15.24 billion for the quarter.

So, what about that stock split the company announced back in April? A shareholder lawsuit gummed up the works for that one. While the move passed a shareholder vote in June, the split, which would create a third class of stock, was still pending as of September.

Top image courtesy of John of Austin/Flickr

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