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Here's How Much a $1000 Investment in Alphabet Made 10 Years Ago Would Be Worth Today

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How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to GOOGL for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Alphabet's Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Alphabet's main business drivers.

Alphabet is one of the most innovative companies in the modern technological age. Over the last few years, the company has evolved from primarily being a search-engine provider to cloud computing, ad-based video and music streaming, autonomous vehicles, healthcare providers and others. In the online search arena, Google has a monopoly with more than 94% of the online search volume and market. Over the years, the company has witnessed increase in search queries, resulting from ongoing growth in user adoption and usage, primarily on mobile devices, continued growth in advertiser activity, and improvements in ad formats.

The company is gaining market share in the cloud-computing, driven by continued strength in Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace.

Alphabet also enjoys a dominant position in the autonomous vehicles market, thanks to Waymo’s relentless efforts. In addition, it has bolstered its footprint in the healthcare industry with its life science division, Verily. The company has also become a renowned name in the world of entertainment on the back of YouTube.

Alphabet is also known as the maker of smartwatches (Pixel Watch), laptops and tablets (Chromebooks), and smart home products (Google Nest).

Alphabet, headquartered in Mountain View, CA, runs several businesses, most of which come under Google, which reports under two segments — Google Services and Google Cloud. The non-Google businesses fall under the Other Bets segment.

Total revenues were $307.4 billion in 2023, up 9% from 2022. Google Services, Google Cloud and Other Bets generated 88.7%, 10.8% and 0.5% of total revenues, respectively.

The Google Services includes products and services such as ads, Android, Chrome, devices, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Play, Search, and YouTube. The segment generates revenues primarily from performance and brand advertising, which remains crucial for the overall business. Ad revenues accounted for 77.4% of the total revenues in 2023.

Google Cloud is comprised of Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace. Its key capabilities include AI infrastructure, database and analytics, collaboration tools, cybersecurity and generative AI.

Other Bets is a combination of multiple businesses, generating revenues primarily from the sale of healthcare-related and internet services.

Bottom Line

While anyone can invest, building a lucrative investment portfolio takes research, patience, and a little bit of risk. If you had invested in Alphabet ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.

A $1000 investment made in November 2014 would be worth $6,399, or a gain of 539.90%, as of November 7, 2024, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.

In comparison, the S&P 500 gained 191.90% and the price of gold went up 117.49% over the same time frame.

Looking ahead, analysts are expecting more upside for GOOGL.

Alphabet is riding on strong cloud and search growth. Google Cloud is benefiting from accelerated growth across AI infrastructure, enterprise AI platform Vertex, generative AI (Gen AI) solutions and core Google Cloud Platform products. GOOGL’s strong AI portfolio is helping it attract new customers, win larger deals, and deepen product adoption among existing customers. Alphabet’s expanding GenAI capabilities present a potential catalyst for future growth. Its dominant position in the search engine market is a strong growth driver. Major search updates and removal of bad ads to enhance the search results continue to boost traffic on Google’s search engine. Alphabet outperformed its industry year to date. However, increasing litigation issues and expenses remain concerns. Rising cloud competition from Microsoft and Amazon is a concern.&a

The stock is up 9.05% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 15 higher, for fiscal 2024. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.

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