Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2013, during the trading session of 18 October; its share prices, market capitalisations and Apple comparison are 2013 figures. Google later split its stock and became part of Alphabet in 2015, so the $1,000 level is not comparable with today’s quotes.
Google has crossed the $1,000-per-share mark. As of this writing, the company is up 13.70% at $1,010.60, after its third-quarter results beat Wall Street’s expectations.
Nine years ago, Google went public at $85 a share. Today it has diversified its revenue across a wide range of services. It now includes YouTube, the largest video platform on the internet; Android, the operating system found on almost 1 billion phones and tablets; and it is the number one company in online advertising, well ahead of its rivals Facebook and Yahoo.
This has led its shares to double in price over the last five years. In recent months, concerns about falling ad prices had raised doubts, but the results have cleared them up: the cost per click has gone down, but more users have clicked on the ads, lifting its profit by 36%.
The drop in the price per click is partly due to the growing number of users browsing on mobile devices.
Google’s market capitalisation is $338 billion, still some way behind the current $462 billion of its rival Apple, a company that is once again fighting to become the most valuable in the world.
Featured image: Luis Villa del Campo, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
