Jump to content

GOOGL - Google


Liberty

Recommended Posts

  • 3 weeks later...
  • Replies 2.1k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Top Posters In This Topic

Posted Images

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/waymo-to-start-first-driverless-car-service-next-month

 

Waymo, the secretive subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is planning to launch the world’s first commercial driverless car service in early December, according to a person familiar with the plans. It will operate under a new brand and compete directly with Uber and Lyft.

 

Waymo is keeping the new name a closely guarded secret until the formal announcement, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been made public.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/waymo-to-start-first-driverless-car-service-next-month

 

Waymo, the secretive subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is planning to launch the world’s first commercial driverless car service in early December, according to a person familiar with the plans. It will operate under a new brand and compete directly with Uber and Lyft.

 

Waymo is keeping the new name a closely guarded secret until the formal announcement, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been made public.

 

Big news if true

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Stock is trading at $1025, down about 20% from its 52 week high and is near its 52 week low of $980. Earnings are forecast to be $42/share in 2018 so PE is about 24, which looks reasonable. The company also has net cash of $100 billion (market cap is $715 billion). Earnings estimate for 2019 is $47 (Yahoo finance).

 

Top line is expected to grow close to 20% in the coming years. Druckenmiller likes Google alot; calls them a disruptor and says they are the leader in AI and driverless cars. These two categories should add to revenue in the future.

 

Picked up some shares today; price looks reasonable. Lets hope it continues to sell off (I would love for it to get cheap enough to back up the truck). This company looks ideally positioned to do very welll in the coming years. (I am going for ‘a great business at a reasonable price’ thesis :-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm watching too.  Needs to keep coming.  Don't like the dual class structure/governance and compensation issues.  I think Waze and google maps could/will be valuable as fk.  I look up directions now and it offers me the chance to hire an uber or lyft right in the app.  Also google assistant blows alexa and siri out of the water in my experience.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Profile of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and scaling Google in the early days. If you like this, it's worth looking up Jeff on Youtube, he's given a number of interesting talks.

 

Jeff & Sanjay came up with distributed map/reduce, and wrote the paper on it that led to open source implementations like Hadoop (cf every tech company, cloudera):

 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Found the talk I was thinking about that mirrors the New Yorker article if you want photos and personal storytelling.

 

Edit: here's a good later one on his current work. In some ways echos what they were doing in the early days: write software to take advantage of massive scale ("commodity hardware wave" in the first case, generally Moore's law, advances in storage, bandwidth, etc) that becomes cheaper and cheaper:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/23/18193994/youtube-tv-now-available-nationwide

 

"Google launches YouTube TV in 95 new US markets, says it now covers 98% of US households"

 

I've had YouTube TV for almost a year and it is a great service.  When I got rid of cable a year and a half ago I 1st tried Playstation Vue, but wasn't happy with it, the picture quality was awful and the interface was as bad as your old cable box.  YouTube TV has excellent quality picture 100% of the time and a much better interface as well as a better cloud DVR service.  I tried to find how many subscribers there are and the best I could find is an estimate of 800K back in June 2018. I am surprised it isn't way more because this is just an excellent product.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The issue for me is just that the price of high-speed internet + the $/40/month for YouTube TV doesn't really end up any cheaper that a cable internet/tv package through Comcast or most other cable TV providers. Not sure about other cable providers, but if you remove TV service from Comcast, they still charge around $100/month for internet. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high-speed internet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The issue for me is just that the price of high-speed internet + the $/40/month for YouTube TV doesn't really end up any cheaper that a cable internet/tv package through Comcast or most other cable TV providers. Not sure about other cable providers, but if you remove TV service from Comcast, they still charge around $100/month for internet. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high-speed internet.

 

I was paying over $230/mo to comcast for TV, 200mbps internet (no cap), and home phone.  I now pay Comcast $99/mo for 400mbps internet (no cap), youtube TV $40/mo and Ooma $4/mo for phone.  I could have kept the 200mbps internet for cheaper I think it might have been $69 or $79/mo.

 

Also as far as competition goes Fairpoint offers Fiber to about half of my town, which directly competes with Comcast. But not in my neighborhood, so I have no choice but to use Comcast.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Q4:

 

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2018Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=adc3b38

 

Capex up over 25bn in the past year, more than MSFT..

 

I was pretty shocked at the capex growth.  2x last year and about 3x depr/amort.  That's on top of 50% growth in R&D.  I get investing for the future (and 22% revenue growth is nothing to sneeze at for a company this size) but would love to get more color in exactly what that spend is going toward and what their capital hurdle rates are for the spend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Q4:

 

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2018Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=adc3b38

 

Capex up over 25bn in the past year, more than MSFT..

 

I was pretty shocked at the capex growth.  2x last year and about 3x depr/amort.  That's on top of 50% growth in R&D.  I get investing for the future (and 22% revenue growth is nothing to sneeze at for a company this size) but would love to get more color in exactly what that spend is going toward and what their capital hurdle rates are for the spend.

 

Also, the number of employee’s is up 23%’ a bit more than revenues. Same problem than FB, where costs are rising faster than revenues. I get the increased losses at Google ventures, but the margin and cost trends in the core business are a bit worrisome.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It had been over a year since I purchased some GOOG, but after hours I forced myself to pull the trigger on a small piece. There's some moderate "concerns" but Google is basically the new Visa. It's "everywhere you want to be".

 

All jokes aside, its core business remains moaty, and the growth is still there. Youtube IMO is really becoming a dominant piece of internet real estate. Whereas I view BRK as the perfect collection of "old economy" businesses, I consider Google to be the perfect collection of "new economy" businesses/assets. I dont expect massive outperformance here, but it's more stable and better diversified IMO than the FB's, AMZN's, AAPL's, and NFLX's of the investing universe. Only company(of the big ones) that I'd say is better situated is MSFT.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...