Google wows Wall Street with strong Q1, but deflects questions about its business since Trump’s tariffs

If the economy goes to a collapse, Google doesn't feel it.

Or at least, it didn't feel until March 31.

Internet search giant has reported strong Q1 results On Thursday that sent its stock about 5% after time, as major advertising and cloud businesses delivered healthy growth. But these results apply to the first quarter of the calendar of the year, even before Trump's entire global trade war began.

As for business conditions is currently being experienced by Google: Google does not say. Executives at the Google-Parent Alphabet company maintain a discipline of Thursday's revenues calling about anything that happened in the current quarter, despite the analysts' efforts to get an update.

“It's really too early to comment,” chief business officer Philipp Schindler said in response to such a query.

“We are obviously not immune to the macro environment, but we do not want to think about the potential effects,” Schindler said. .

After weeks of excitement in the markets, and various concerns weighing on Google in particular, the strong Q1 report card card – with this news drops its dividend a cent of one part and re -buy another $ 70 billion stock – is more than sufficient reason for investors to celebrate on Thursday.

Google raised the topline 12% year-year in Q1 to $ 90.2 billion, defeating the average analyst hopes of $ 89.2 billion, while each part revenue came to $ 2.81 compared to the $ 2.01 Wall Street expects. The company described the growth in strong demand from advertisers in the financial, insurance, health, and retail industry industry.

Revenue from Ads on the YouTube video site has grown 10% from last year to $ 8.9 billion, while Google's Cloud Business rose 28% to $ 12.3 billion.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai touted gains in the company's AI efforts, including the “AI General -Idea” combined throughout the Google search service, which Pichai said today is used by 1.5 billion users per month. And the company has reaffirmed its previously announced plans to spend $ 75 billion on capital expenditures for the cloud and AI infrastructure this year, which signed that it remains bullish in the AI ​​business.

There are many risks facing Google

This is a tricky time for the alphabet. Going to the Thursday's revenue report, the company's sharing is approximately 15% to this year, greater than the collapse suffered by the NASDAQ or the S&P 500.

Alphabet's business faces serious risks in many fronts, as the economic uncertainty of Trump's tariffs forces the main advertising business, the proliferation of powerful new AI models threatens to interrupt the dominance in internet search, and government regulators seek to break the company.

Court cases and regulation-facing threats faced by the alphabet were not formed during Thursday's revenue call, as executives highlighted development in various company products, from rapidly growing YouTube subscriptions to self-driving Waymo cars.

The fact that the alphabet in history has not offered detailed “guide” forecasts to its revenue calls provides some cover to prevent elephant in the room – the current state of demand from advertisers (compared to the state of demand in Q1).

Since advertising accounts for nearly three-quarters of alphabet revenue, the health of the global ad market in the coming months will be critical. Advertising and marketing budgets are usually among the first costs that companies cut into an economic collapse, and uncertain to tariffs, many economists and investors are concerned about a potential retreat.

If the Google business was truly falling into a ravine in April, the company may have felt obliged to even provide some kind of warning. For some, the fact that Google has remained a mother can be interpreted as a tacit sign of confidence. And while Schindler was distinguisted questions about business conditions in April, he thought of Google's experience in previous economic backdraws and the comparison of advertising stability in search compared to other types of advertising.

“To make it out,” Schindler said, “I will say that we have a lot of management experiences through uncertain times.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com