Google earnings for Q3 2012 pushed out early, causes Mayhem

It is never good to release your company earnings for a quarter prematurely. Unfortunately that is exactly what happened with Google. The three month quarter wasn’t exactly what we had all hoped for either. Google pulled in $2.78 billion in operating income, 19% of its $14.1 billion in revenues. This number is down though from the same quarter last year where they had $3.08 billion in operating income. Motorola did help bring some cash flow in though, contributing $2.58 billion in revenue, but helped out with $505 million in losses.

It isn’t the end of the world, but these numbers are down. Losing money is never something that investors ever want to hear. With the early release of their eranings report Google stopped trading on NASDAQ.

“Earlier this morning RR Donnelley, the financial printer, informed us that they had filed our draft 8-K earnings statement without authorization. We have ceased trading on NASDAQ while we work to finalize the document. Once it’s finalized we will release our earnings, resume trading on Nasdaq and hold our earnings call as normal.”

You can see in the image below how that looks. It sure wasn’t pretty for Google.

The earnings were prematurely released to the SEC and was missing a quote from CEO Larry Page. It was clearly marked as “PENDING LARRY QUOTE.” Not that it really mattered at that point because the earnings report should have never been sent over in the first place. Well, at least not at the time that it was.

All is right in the world again though as Larry Page has since added his two cents to the document which makes the diminished numbers not so bad and the confirms the numbers that were previously let loose early.

“We had a strong quarter. Revenue was up 45 percent year-on-year, and, at just fourteen years old, we cleared our first $14 billion revenue quarter. I am also really excited about the progress we’re making creating a beautifully simple, intuitive Google experience across all devices.”

Stock trading has once again resumed and Google is back to business as usual. The official investors call to go over the earnings for the quarter is underway right now. Hopefully there will be some more news come from that call that will help Google recover a little bit more from this snaffu.

Source: AndroidCentral