Google’s record-breaking Q2: Over $9B in revenue, 32% growth

Google announced its second quarter earnings today, soundly trouncing Wall Street expectations.

The company earned $9.03 billion during the quarter (as of the end of June) — a new quarterly record — whereas the Street expected around $8.6 billion. That’s an increase of 32 percent over last year, when the search giant had revenues of $6.82 billion for the same period.

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“We have substantially increased our velocity and execution this quarter, a key goal of mine since taking over as CEO,” Google co-founder Larry Page said in today’s earnings call with investors. “It’s why I created a new, product focused management structure, with a clear leader responsible for each product area.”

Page confirmed that Google+, the company’s fledgling social network, has over 10 million users. Additionally, he said that over 550,000 Android devices are being activated every day, Google Chrome has over 160 million users, and the company’s +1 button for sharing content is being served 2.3 billion times daily.

The Q2 numbers are an improvement over last quarter, where rising costs ate into Google’s earnings. Operating expenses continued to rise in Q2, up to $2.97 billion from $2.84 billion last quarter, but they remained a steady 33 percent of revenues. Last year, Google’s operating expenses were $1.99 billion, or 29 percent of revenue.

Q2 operating income was $2.88 billion, or 32 percent of revenues. Net income was $2.51 billion, a big increase over last year’s $1.84 billion.

Other highlights from the earnings report:

• Google-owned site revenue was $6.23 billion (69 percent of revenues), up 39 percent from last year
• Google network revenues (via AdSense programs on partner sites) were $2.48 billion, or 28 percent of revenues, a 20 percent increase from last year
• International revenues totaled $4.87 billion (54 percent of total revenues), up two percentage points from a year ago
• Paid clicks on ads increased 18 percent from last year, but decreased 2 percent from last quarter
• Cost-per-click increased 12 percent over last year and 6 percent over last quarter

Google reports that it had $39.1 billion in cash at the end of the quarter. The company also had 28,768 employees by the end of June, up from 26,316 from the end of March.