Google, er, Alphabet, to report earnings this afternoon

Going forward, Google’s parent company may have an advantage over Apple, at least in terms of remaining the most valuable firm in the world.

Alphabet shares closed at $761.35 on Friday, valuing the company at about $517 billion, 4.4 percent shy of Apple’s valuation of about $540 billion.

Alphabet’s overall earnings results were better than expected, passing Apple as the most valuable company in the world. “Then iPhone madness began”, the report notes.

Wall Street is, without a doubt, quite happy with Alphabet’s (Google’s) earnings. “From that point through the end of 2015, its shares soared 44 percent, while Apple’s sank 16 percent”.

During a conference call to discuss the earnings, Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said sales in the United Kingdom were up 20% from previous year.

In the first quarterly results since officially switching to the Alphabet structure on 2 October 2015, the company reported a profit of $4.9bn on revenues of $21.3bn.

Over the course of the last several months, Apple shares have fallen steadily, dropping its peak valuation of $740 billion to ~$540 billion.

Alphabet’s claiming of the most value company title has been seen by some as a passing of the technology baton. The company will hold a call with analysts at 1:30 p.m.

The sum of the total operating costs was mostly from the thermostats and smoke detectors from Nest, the Internet balloons of Project Loon, the investment in medical research of Verily, robots and other undisclosed moonshot projects of Google X.

The revenue increase was attributed to strong growth in mobile search, YouTube and advertising.

Paid click volumes were up 31 percent compared to the same quarter in 2014, with 40 percent growth on Google-owned sites versus the Google Adsense network where other sites host ads provided by Google; YouTube’s TrueView ad format was credited with boosting clicks, particularly with mobile users.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted during the report that seven Google consumer products have more than 1 billion monthly active users, including Gmail, Search, Android, Maps, Chrome, Youtube, and Google Play.

The online company said its revenue from search ads rose 31% in the fourth quarter compared to the same period a year earlier.