Google's investment Savvy

What helped fuel Google's earnings blowout earlier this year? The same thing that fuels a lot of our wealth: Alphabet, Google's parent company, is a savvy investor. Alphabet gained more than $1 billion just on its outside investments in the first quarter. Alphabet was the most active and largest corporate investor in the tech sector in 2017, surpassing international players like both SoftBank Group of Japan and Intel’s Intel Capital.

During the quarter Alphabet reported Monday, one investment, Glassdoor Inc., was sold for $1.2 billion to a Japanese human resources company called Recruit Holdings, while another, the electronic signature company DocuSign had a strong IPO. Two security investments have paid off recently as well, as cloud security firm Evident.io was acquired by Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler went public in the first quarter.

Alphabet’s investments gained more than $3 billion in the first quarter. With the $1 billion-plus disclosed Monday, the total gains for Alphabet’s investments in the first half of the year account for nearly one-third of Google’s GAAP net income figure for that period.