Earlier this morning when I was scanning through Google’s(s goog) third quarter 2012 earnings, I noticed that revenue in Google’s “Other” category came in at $666 million, versus $385 million in Q3 2011. It was such a substantial jump that I pinged a couple of Wall Street analysts, wondering if they could explain the jump.
Mark Mahaney, who follows Google for Citi Research, in an email said that the jump could be explained by the Nexus 7 sales. Mark thinks Google sold about a million units of their tablet (that is made by Asus) and that accounts for about $200 million in revenue. Ben Schachter of McQuarie Securities agrees and estimates that Nexus 7 sales accounted for probably $150 million to $200 million of the $281 million jump in other revenue.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Muster estimates that Google sold between 800,000 to a million units, while Doug Anmuth of JP Morgan says Google sold about 700,000 units of Nexus 7 tablets. These numbers aren’t terribly surprising: The low-cost tablet “sets the standard for small slates” according to my collegue Kevin Tofel, who reviewed the device in July.
In 2011, Google had $1.37 billion in “other revenues.” These “other” include money Google rakes in from licensing, enterprise applications, and its various app stores. Now, we’ll have to add Nexus tablet revenues to the mix.
I’m pretty sure Google only books revenue on Nexus 7 tablets sold directly by them. Other retailers get their shipments from Asus, and I don’t think Google books any revenue for those… these analysts should probably clarify.
No one said anything otherwise – all analysts are calculating direct from web sales as revenues.
Actually, several Nvidia analysts misunderstood the implications and came out with negative commentary on Nvidia following these comments from the Google analysts. They took it to mean that the 700K-1M estimate accounts for all Nexus 7’s sold, and then further argued that this was evidence that Nvidia is set to fall far short of their revenue guidance for Tegra 3.
See http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/10/19/nvda-fbr-cuts-to-hold-pc-air-pocket-outweighs-tegra-wins/
Nvidia went down 6% on Friday seemingly on this news and AMD’s horrible quarter. When in fact I believe 700K-1M direct web sales by Google is actually a positive datapoint for overall Nexus 7 sales.
Isn’t Google selling Nexus tablets at or near cost? How is $200 million at zero or near zero margin impressive?
I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it. How much PROFIT did they make from this product? Also, if the idea is to make money from the services such as media and apps, how much did they make from that? People are speculating whether Apple will meet the pricing of the Nexus or the Kindle Fire with their iPad mini/air, but why would they when these devices are sold at cost? I have to believe investors will demand more from Google on this when their other hardware venture Motorola is losing money.
Last year they made 2.1 billion from mobile which include media playstore mobile ads etc.
this year its 8 billion revenue
Amazon sells almost everything at zero cost. Is Amazon not impressive? It’s a 100B EV company – that’s impressive enough for me
Amazon sells almost everything at zero cost. Is Amazon not impressive? It’s a 100B EV company – that’s impressive enough for me. Google isn’t a hardware company, they don’t aspire to make maximum profit off their devices. They want Android ubiquity so they can dominate mobile search — a very very profitable business.
Microsoft in six months will equal that number, Apple will equal that number 4 hours with the seven inch iPad. Google will be a distant number three in nine months.
Maybe the next Google Nexus 7 Tablet will be sporting a SHARP IGZO (Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide) Display. More energy efficient, due to it’s design that uses less battery power!!!
http://bit.ly/TAGXpj