Google's entire net income gain due to one-time currency translations

Yep.  Read the news at Bloomberg. I wonder how long it'll take Squawk Box and the CNBC crowd to start reporting the actual news?

Net income at Google rose to 1.31 billion, from 1 billion a year earlier, the California-based company said today in a statement.  A rise in the value of overseas currencies helped boost international sales. Without the change in currency rates, net income would have been 202 million lower, Google said.

"I don't think that kind of foreign currency benefit was expected," said Jane Snorek, who helps manage more than $70 billion in assets at First American Funds in Minneapolis.

Google also announced that the number of clicks on advertisements had increased 20 percent this quarter, which is down from 52 percent growth last quarter- the steepest drop in the company's history.

Without the currency translation benefits (basically the US dollar collapsing) Google would have shown almost flat year-over-year income growth; hardly the kind of performance that warranted today's afterhours gain of 24 billion dollars in market cap.

Comments

[rassoodock]

Just a reminder that you can't predict the weather, even if they are cooking the books...

[Elmo]

Come for the entertainment (giga-schadenfreude) ... stay for the peesing matches, gloating and smuggy toldya-so's.

XX00XX, Elmo

[hilarious]

I'm watching CNBC right now and nobody has yet mentioned that all of google's "amazing growth" came from a currency trick.

Is CNBC completely unaware of this? Does nobody on wall street read bloomberg?

Or is everyone intentionally avoiding the issue to make the investing public feel like everything is OK and its safe to start piling into tech stocks again because you might get lucky and "hit the lottery" and see your stock go up 80 points overnight too?

[gazzle]

Re: Hilarious:

Wall street doesn't care about the facts. They just care about generating more transactions (look at the mortgage market).. that's how they make money... the more they can make the market go up and down... up and down, the better. Spinning the Google news as positive only helps the fluctuation continue further before the eventual plunge of GOOG and the market in general.

[Der]

Google is getting fewer clicks because they are showing fewer ads and reduced the clickable area of their ads. Their goal is to raise the quality of the clicks for advertisers, who will subsequently bid more. Fewer clicks, but proportionally more money per click.

A lot of people didn't realize that and now are paying for their stupidity.

[.]

Even if they are getting more money for less clicks, why did they actually earn about 100 million dollars LESS than the first quarter of last year, if you take out the 200 million dollar currency translation "profit" ?

How clear does it have to be that Google is making less money as a business than they were LAST YEAR IN THE FIRST QUARTER.

If some guy working at google wins the lotto, then donates 500 million dollars to Google because he feels like it, can Google claim that they suddenly are 500 million dollars more profitable as a business?