Needham Ups Google Price Target to $225, Sees Strong Cloud and Ad Revenue

Needham & Company, a leading investment bank and asset management firm, has recently increased its price target for Google's stock to $225, citing strong growth in the company's cloud and advertising segments. This move reflects the firm's confidence in Google's ability to maintain its competitive edge in the tech industry, driven by its investments in AI and generative AI solutions.

Google's cloud segment has been a significant driver of its growth, with revenue surging by 35% year over year in Q3 2024. This impressive growth was fueled by increasing demand for cloud computing, dependency on cloud infrastructure for scalability, and the growing popularity of microservices. Tough competition from the largest cloud providers, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, has forced all cloud providers to continually innovate and offer new services to gain or retain existing customers.

AI on the cloud has further fueled the demand for cloud infrastructure. AI development, deployment, and management for various applications are more straightforward on the cloud, with the availability of tools for data storage, data processing, and easy integration of machine learning in AI models. One of the critical factors that would drive the development of AI on the cloud is the providers' offer of a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Google Cloud generated record sales and profitability in Q4 2023. Here are five key takeaways from Google's Q4 2023 earnings results:

1. Google Cloud bested Wall Street expectations by generating over $9.1 billion in revenue during its fourth quarter 2023, as the cloud giant reported its most profitable quarter in company history.
2. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Cloud accounted for nearly 11 percent of parent company Google’s total revenue of $86 billion in Q4 2023.
3. Artificial intelligence was top of mind for Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his leadership team during Google’s Q4 2023 earnings call this week, with a particular focus on highlighting momentum around Gemini, Duet AI, and Vertex AI.
4. “Using Vertex AI, Samsung recently announced its Galaxy S24 Series smartphone with Gemini and Imagen 2, our advanced text-to-image model,” said Pichai. “Victoria Secret & Company will look to personalize and improve the customer experience with Gemini, Vertex AI search and conversations. … In Workspace, Duet AI is helping employees benefit from improved productivity and creativity with thousands of paying customers around the world, including Singapore Post, Uber and Woolworths.”
5. Overall, 2023 was a year of “profound innovation and product momentum,” said Pichai. “I’m excited for what’s ahead in 2024.”

CRN takes a look at the five most important takeaways from Google Cloud’s Q4 2023 financial earnings results this week, including sales growth, profitability, and everything AI and generative AI.



No. 1: Google Cloud Records Record Profitability
Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Cloud reported $864 million in operating income for fourth quarter 2023, representing the most profitable quarter in the cloud company’s history. Google Cloud’s operating income of $864 million in Q4 2023 is up significantly from an operating loss of $186 million during the same quarter one year ago. This means Google Cloud improved its operating income by over $1 billion from Q4 2022 to Q4 2023, which is a significant accomplishment.

For years, Google Cloud was in the red due to the company investing billions each quarter to expand its global cloud infrastructure and services reach. That changed in 2023 when Google Cloud reported a profit for the first time in its history in Q1 2023 by generating $191 million in operation income. For the entire 2023, Google Cloud achieved a 5.2 percent operating margin which marks the company’s first year with a positive operating margin. In 2022, Google recorded a 7.2 percent operating margin loss. In 2020, Google Cloud reported a 42.9 percent operating margin loss during the year.

“Our infrastructure is key to realizing our big AI ambitions. It’s a major differentiator for us,” said Pichai. “We continue to invest responsibly in our data centers and compute to support this new wave of growth in AI-powered services for us and for our customers. Through this, we are being disciplined in how we run the company.”

With four straight quarters of positive operating income, Google Cloud has positioned itself to never be in the red again.

Gemini Is ‘Only Going To Get Better’; Gemini Ultra ‘Coming Soon’
Google’s new large AI model Gemini was front and center in the discussion during the company’s earnings call this week, unveiling that Gemini will be included in Google’s core products. “[Gemini] can run on everything from mobile devices to data centers,” said CEO Sundar Pichai. “Gemini gives us a great foundation. It’s already demonstrating state of the art capabilities, and it’s only going to get better.”

Google said it is going to roll out even more advanced versions of Gemini in the future. “Gemini Ultra is coming soon. The team is already working on the next versions and bringing it to our products that starts with search,” said Google’s CEO. “We are already experimenting with Gemini in search, where it’s making our Search Generative Experience (SGE) faster for users. We have seen a 40-percent reduction in latency in English in the US.”

Gemini will be injected into core products, such as Google search and Google Ads, as the AI product looks to boost natural language conversational capabilities. Gemini was engineered to understand and combine video, audio, text, images, and code in a natively multimodal way.

Google Cloud Boosts Sales By 26 Percent
Google Cloud, the world’s third largest cloud computing company, bested Wall Street analysts revenue estimates by generating $9.19 billion in total sales in Q4 2023. This represents a nearly 26 percent year-over-year sales growth compared to $7.32 billion sales Google Cloud captured in Q4 2022. Google Cloud now has an annual run rate over $36.8 billion.

Google Cloud’s sales growth in the fourth quarter was higher compared to its previous quarters. In third quarter 2023, Google Cloud reported a 22 percent year-over-year sales growth, while in the first two quarters of 2024, the company reported sales growth of 28 percent and 29 percent, respectively.



Needham & Company analyst Rajvindra Gill recently increased his price target for Google’s stock to $225, citing the company’s strong cloud and advertising segments. “Google Cloud’s revenue growth has been impressive, with a 35 percent year-over-year increase in Q3 2024,” said Gill. “The company’s cloud segment is benefiting from increased enterprise consumption of Google’s cloud database service in combination with the Vertex AI model customization platform. BigQuery machine learning operations have also increased by 80 percent over the last two quarters.”

Gill also noted that Google’s advertising segment has been strong, with a 6% year-over-year increase in 2023. “Google’s ad revenue is expected to continue to rise, with industry analysts forecasting a 14.9 percent annual growth in 2024,” said Gill. “Google’s dominant market share in online advertising and its diverse offering of ad inventory should help the company maintain its strong ad revenue growth.”

In conclusion, Needham & Company’s increased price target for Google’s stock reflects the company’s strong performance in its cloud and advertising segments. Google’s investments in AI and generative AI solutions have driven its growth and positioned the company to maintain its competitive edge in the tech industry. As Google continues to innovate and invest responsibly in its infrastructure, it is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for cloud services and online advertising.