Alphabet is worth more than $2 trillion

Speaking of a payback effect: Google owner Alphabet translates a first dividend into 200 billion extra market value.

Stress, what stress? A day after the off day on Thursday, Wall Street resumes its climb. Even a fresh inflation figure does not really keep investors awake, because it is becoming clear that the Federal Reserve’s hoped-for first interest rate cut will come with a ‘please be patient’ sign.

The Dow Jones

is still taking it relatively easy with half a percent gain, but the Nasdaq

is almost 2 percent higher.

The tech fair is mainly attracted to Alphabet

. The internet giant translates a strong quarterly report into a price that rises a tenth to $ 173, a record. The stock market value increases by 200 billion dollars in one go to 2,150 billion dollars.

To give an idea: 200 billion dollars, which is roughly the total market value of AB InBev, KBC, UCB and Argenx, the four largest Belgian companies. Alphabet already flirted with a market value of 2,000 billion two years ago, but at the end of trading always remained below the limit of 2 trillion dollars (see graph).

“The Christmas on the cake,” is what Mark Kelley, an analyst at the stock exchange Stifel, calls the decision to pay investors a dividend for the first time, 20 years after the IPO in 2004. The cake is the quarterly report, which indicates that the flagships – the search engine Google and the coma viewing channel YouTube – cash machines remain. Cash machines that come into their own even more now that CEO Sundar Pichai keeps costs under tight control.

Alphabet achieved $23.7 billion in net profit on $80.5 billion in revenue last quarter. Net cash flow swelled to $28.8 billion, from $23.5 billion a year earlier. Then you can treat investors to a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share, the equivalent of an outflow of $2.5 billion.

Intel was of a completely different caliber

. The chip giant was once a leading name on Nasdaq, but has been lost for years and has to leave market leadership in growth areas such as data center chips for artificial intelligence to Nvidia. A poor turnover forecast for the current quarter once again underlined how difficult it is for CEO Pat Gelsinger to get the turnover engine going again. Result: a price drop of 11 percent.