Google shares hitting new record in after hours trading

Google shares rised sharply after exceeding Wall Street's expectations (Reuters)

Google continued to march onwards through the third quarter, with the search engine giant's shares hitting a new record in after hours trading on Thursday after its results surpassed Wall Street's expectations.

The Californian firm said it booked $14.9bn in consolidated revenues in the three months to the end of September, up 12 per cent on the year. The figure was higher than the around $14.8bn figure forecast by analysts. Net income came in at $2.97bn, up from $2.18bn last year, while paid clicks across its services rose by 26 per cent in year on year terms. The average cost per click, a closely watched metric that measures how much advertisers pay when Google users click on their ads, declined by 8 per cent compared to the third quarter of 2012, and by 4 per cent compared to the second quarter this year, indicating that the company making progress in reversing the decline.

Though positive overall, the update showed that the company's Motorola Mobile phone business had slipped deeper into the red. The unit's operating loss ballooned to $248m over the quarter, against $192m in the same period last year.

Cheered by the headline figures, investors drove up Google's shares by around 8 per cent in after-hours trading to nearly $960 apiece, a new milestone for a stock whose previous record high was $928 apiece.