Market figures have not been kind to Google this week as the tech giant was dealt a devastating blow to its shares last night. The Silicon Valley mainstay saw its share prices plummet on Tuesday’s opening day, wiping around $70bn (£54bn) from the company’s market value, its biggest fall in nearly seven years.
Flat Sales Figures
Google has already been struggling in the markets, with investors worried about disappointing sales figures that the company released for the first quarter of 2019.
Some are even concerned that advertisers and customers alike are moving to Google’s competitors to conduct business with digital rivals like Amazon and Facebook.
Alphabet, the parent company who operates both Google and video sharing service YouTube, has also suffered in the markets this week.
In a single day, the company’s share price dropped around 8%, the biggest fall for the group since trading took a hit in 2012.
First quarter results from the company have been generally disappointing to major shareholders, despite heavy investment in Google’s product ranges, subsidiaries, and advertising across all major platforms.
Slow Growth
Google is now worth approximately $830bn, despite disappointing revenue reports from the first quarter of the year. In 2019, Google has consistently reported positive but incredibly slow growth, signaling that investor and consumer faith in the company has begun to diminish.
Google’s CEO has pledged to try and invest more in their subsidiary companies – particularly YouTube, which has been heavily criticized in recent weeks for incorrect algorithms, concerns to user privacy and failing to monitor content which resulted in hate speech and other disturbing advertisements being attached to videos meant for children.
Google is also fighting to remain competitive within its own industry – news of this plummet in their share value comes in the same week Facebook reported a record revenue growth and Amazon announced their fourth consecutive quarter of record profits.
Even Microsoft, considered the least competitive of the group, reported positive profits for the first quarter and is now the third company in existence to be valued above $1tn.