Alphabet’s market cap tops Apple, is now the world’s most valuable company

Enlarge / Our current understanding of Alphabet's layout. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google's intent to transition to "Alphabet"-a company-full-of-companies that better represents the current layout of Larry Page's conglomerate-was announced back in August 2015. After getting organized and actually going through with the transition, today marks the first quarter of Alphabet's existence and its first earnings report. It even has a brand new investor site to celebrate.

For Q4 2015, Alphabet beat analyst estimates of 8.10 per Class A share and 20.77 billion on revenue, with $8.67 per share and 21.33 billion in revenue. The news sent the price of Alphabet stock up over 6 percent in after-hours trading, sending Alphabet's market cap over $550 billion. Apple's market cap is sitting at $538 billion, which makes Alphabet the most valuable company in the world. Alphabet's position as highest company by market cap is a product of both Alphabet's rise and Apple's fall. The amount is a far cry from Apple's all-time high of ~774 billion in February 2015.

As the first-ever Alphabet earnings call, Google is breaking out the non-Google parts into a segment called "other bets." Other than Nest and Google Fiber, the "other bets" segment is basically made up of Alphabet's moonshots. The company says the "other bets" segment had $448 million in revenue for 2015 ($327 million this quarter), but overall Alphabet's non-Google companies lost $3.567 billion this year, with $1.942 billion of that coming just this quarter.

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