SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc has revealed its fourth quarter results and even though the company has reported a 17 percent increase in profits, it fell well short of Wall Street estimates. Consequently Google shares took a hit of almost 7 percent in after-hours trading falling to $527.40.
Google said that it earned $1.21 billion or $3.79 a share in the three months ending December 31. While this was much better than the $1.03 billion, or $3.29 a share recorded at the same time last year, analysts had expected better.
A Thomson Financial poll had revealed that analysts were expecting the search engine giant to post earnings of $4.44 a share on net revenue of $3.45 billion. However Google's earnings fell marginally short at $4.43 a share on net revenue of $3.39 billion.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed that the company's pioneering AdSense program was hit during the quarter because users were not clicking on ads. "We have had a challenge in the fourth quarter with social networking [advertising] inventory as a whole," Brin revealed. "Some of the monetization work we were doing there did not pan out as we'd hoped."
However Google's AdSense revenues rose to $1.6 billion during the three months as compared to $1.2 billion at the same time last year. "Paid clicks" were up by 3- percent during the quarter, but these were still down from the 45 percent growth posted at the same time last year.
Google's international revenues were also healthy growing by 48 percent during the quarter to $2.42 billion. This figure was much better than the 44 percent recorded during the fourth quarter of 2006.
