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Hot off yesterday’s congressional grilling of their chief executives on whether they’re too big, three internet giants today reported a total of almost $136 billion in second-quarter revenue even after the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon.com Inc. appeared to see a big benefit as the go-to shopping site during the ongoing pandemic. The e-commerce and cloud computing giant reported a profit of $5.2 billion, or $10.30 a share, double a year ago. Revenue jumped 40%, to $88.9 billion, a huge acceleration from its 20% increase a year ago.

Google LLC owner Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., however, saw a big hit from the ad slowdown during the pandemic, since they both make the vast majority of revenue from advertising. Alphabet’s revenue actually fell slightly from a year ago, to $38.3 billion, while Facebook’s revenue grew only 10%, to $18.7 billion.

The varying results reflected the shifting impacts of COVID-19, though the bottom line was that the impact wasn’t nearly as bad as some might have expected. That showed both the resilience of their business models but also their dominance that helped prompt the congressional antitrust probe that thrust all three of the firms’ CEOs before withering congressional criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Indeed, investors seemed at least sanguine about the results of each company, with after-hours trading all positive: Facebook up about 5%, Amazon up 4% and Alphabet up 1%.

Still, the outlook remains uncertain. As Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat summed it up in a conference call: “It is premature to gauge the sustainability of recent trends.”

Here are the details on each of the three internet giants, with more to come after each conducts an analyst conference call this afternoon:

Alphabet

Google’s parent company reported its worst quarter since it went public 15 years ago. Its profit fell from $9.9 billion a year ago to $6.96 billion, or $10.13 a share, in this year’s second quarter, on a 2% revenue decline — that’s right, a decline — to $38.3 billion. That’s a stark reversal of last year’s second-quarter revenue increase of 19%. It still beat analysts’ forecasts of an $8.27-a-share profit on revenue of $37.3 billion.

The revenue decline was a reflection of a broad-based decline in advertising, with companies pausing marketing in key areas such as travel.

But there were some bright spots, in particular Google Cloud, where revenue jumped 43%, to $3.01 billion. “As people increasingly turn to online services, our platforms — from Cloud to Google Play to YouTube — are helping our partners provide important services and support their businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in prepared remarks.

“We’re pleased with the traction of wins from large customers” in Google Cloud, Porat said. She added that Google Cloud Platform is growing significantly faster than G Suite.

“It has announced a number of new products and partnerships that show its roadmap is on track,” said Nucleus Research analyst Daniel Elman. “As another long-term play, Alphabet would like to see this area grow into a significant revenue channel similar to how AWS is to Amazon.”

Amazon

The e-commerce and cloud computing giant reported a profit of $5.2 billion, or $10.30 a share, double a year ago. Revenue jumped 40%, to $88.9 billion, a huge acceleration from its 20% increase a year ago as Amazon became a go-to shopping source during the pandemic. Analysts had forecast a $1.72-a-share profit on a 28% jump in revenue.

“As an online retailer, it was the primary shopping choice for millions of people when physical locations were closed,” said Nucleus’ Elman. “It’s been able to tighten up the slow shipping hiccups that occurred earlier in the shutdown and seems to have the distribution channels accommodated to the increased volume.”

What’s more, Cowen & Co. analyst John Blackledge wrote in a recent note to clients, “that dynamic has remained robust over the past few weeks,” according to a Cowen survey.

Last quarter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said the company would likely spend all the $4 billion in operating profit it expected to make in the second quarter on COVID-19-related expenses to protect employees and provide higher pay, and confirmed in prepared remarks that Amazon did spend that much. That may provide a soft benefit, coming a day after Bezos and his CEO counterparts at Alphabet, Facebook and Apple endured hours of congressional questioning on whether they’re monopolies.

“Amazon is the main beneficiary of ecommerce’s massive pandemic-driven tailwind, but sales gains come with higher costs for labor and logistics and a shift towards a less profitable category mix of lower-margin grocery and household essentials,” said eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman. “Despite the near-term profit hit, Amazon has strengthened its future position in key growth areas like grocery, health and advertising.”

As usual, though, Amazon Web Services provided the lion’s share of profit, though its revenue growth slowed. AWS reported operating income of $3.36 billion, up from $2.12 billion a year ago, on a 30% rise in revenue, to $10.8 billion. That rate was a bit less than the 33% growth clip in the first quarter. Analysts on average were expecting AWS revenue of $11.02 billion.

“For AWS, as businesses were forced to accelerate their digital initiatives, particularly cloud migrations and application modernizations, it was perfectly positioned to onboard and serve these customers,” said Elman. “Expect the growth in the AWS area to be impressive and continue for the foreseeable future.”

Still, AWS’ advantages in the cloud overall don’t extend to the productivity applications that are driving Microsoft Corp.’s and Google’s clouds as more people work from home during the pandemic. “AWS revenue growth is less predictable in the pandemic,” noted Martin Garner, chief operating officer at CCS Insight. “Instead, AWS supports the operations of large numbers of companies, which themselves have been hit by the pandemic. Some of these will see increased cloud usage, such as other retailers accelerating their ecommerce strategy, but others will see reductions.”

Overall, Amazon forecast a wide revenue range of $87 billion to $93 billion in the third quarter, or up 24% to 33%. Operating income is forecast at an even wider range of $2 billion to $5 billion, from $3.2 billion in last year’s third quarter. It assume $2 billion in costs related to COVID-19.

Facebook

The social networking conglomerate reported a profit of $5.18 billion, or $1.80 a share, almost double a year ago. Revenue rose just 10%, to $18.7 billion, a huge slowdown from its 28% jump in the year-ago quarter. Still, both were better than forecasts. Analysts had expected a $1.37-a-share profit on revenue of $17.4 billion.

“Our business has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and, like all companies, we are facing a period of unprecedented uncertainty in our business outlook,” the company said in prepared remarks. “We expect our business performance will be impacted by issues beyond our control, including the duration and efficacy of shelter-in-place orders, the effectiveness of economic stimuli around the world, and the fluctuations of currencies relative to the U.S. dollar.”

Although there was a drumbeat of marketers pausing or boycotting Facebook over its various misinformation issues, that didn’t really start until after the quarter closed. “The effects of that will not be felt until Q3 earnings come out,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

Indeed, Facebook acknowledged the impact of the boycott, adding in its guidance that the impacts of that and other factors were likely to continue: “In the first three weeks of July, our year-over-year ad revenue growth rate was approximately in-line with our second quarter 2020 year-over-year ad revenue growth rate of 10%. We expect our full quarter year-over-year ad revenue growth rate for the third quarter of 2020 will be roughly similar to this July performance.”

Still, the strength of Facebook advertising from small and medium-sized businesses, a source of stability until recently, could be having an outsized impact as those companies suffer the most from pandemic shutdowns.

EMarketer’s revised full-year forecast has Facebook making almost $5 billion less in U.S. ad revenue than its previous forecast, most of that impact in the just-ended quarter. “But we also believe the effects will linger into the second half of the year,” she said. “Economic recovery is looking tenuous as the pandemic drags on.”

Facebook didn’t provide profit guidance for the third quarter and full year, but said revenue is likely to be “roughly similar” for both periods to the 10% uptick it saw in the first few weeks of July. It did provide a somewhat narrower range of total expenses for the full year, $52 billion to $55 billion, and capital spending of $16 billion, at the high end of its previous range of $14 billion to $16 billion. But it said “a great deal of uncertainty remains in our outlook.”

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