The sales of Pixel smartphones in Q2 2019 was good enough to surprise many, including Sundar Pichai.
Google’s devices segment has finally come up to speed after a couple of average years. In a recently released document citing the earnings of the company in the second quarter of 2019, Google announced that it had earned a revenue of $38.9 billion, with $9.9 billion in profit, comfortably beating Wall Street expectations in the process. But, the most important highlight that caught the eyeballs of analysts was in the ‘Other Revenues’ department, which revealed that Google sold twice as many devices in the quarter as compared to the same time last year. It was so much so the case that even Sundar Pichai addressed this point on a recent earnings call. Let us look at this news in a little more detail.
Google Revenue In Q2 2019
As usual, Google’s Ad business helped the tech behemoth to maintain its growth rate. Out of the declared overall revenue of $38.9 billion in Q2 2019, a major chunk came from Google’s ad business amounting to $32.6 billion. The revenue coming from the ‘Other Revenues’ department, however, was not expected. ‘Other Revenues’ looks over all the hardware businesses of Google, namely the Pixel smartphones, Google Home smart speakers as well as its cloud computing division. This department yielded $6.2 billion in revenue, exhibiting a revenue increase of 40% year on year.
Much of this increase was credited to the sales of Pixel smartphones. When asked about the same, this is what the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, had to say :-
“With the launch of Pixel 3A in May, overall Pixel unit sales in Q2 grew more than two times year over year,”
Sales of Pixel Smartphones: The impact of Pixel 3A
The Pixel 3A was deemed to be a success ever since its launch, with some labelling it as the best smartphone in the $400 segment. Targeting the ever-growing and ever-popular $400 segment of smartphones with a lite version of its flagship smartphone turned out to be a masterstroke by Google. Prior to that, Google was finding it difficult to have significant sales of Pixel 3. These struggles were turning out to be so big that the point was mentioned even in the last quarterly earnings call.
However, these were not the only reasons for the success of the smartphone. The smartphone was released on three times as many carriers as the Pixel 2 or 3. On top of that, the timing of the release was also strategic. This was because there were no major devices to compete with. Without these factors, Pixel 3A would not have been able to achieve the success that it was able to achieve.
With Google tweeting an image of the Pixel 4, a device set to come out later this year, they might just kick on in the smartphone business to compete with the likes of One Plus and Apple in the sales department as well.
