The Motley Fool Take Google This Stock

If you’re searching for a strong and growing company with a stock that isn’t terribly overvalued right now, take a look at Google parent company Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) (Nasdaq: GOOGL). At its core, Alphabet is an advertising company. Through the first nine months of the year, 86 percent of the company’s revenue came from ads. It’s not hard to see why — Google has eight different products with more than 1 billion users each: Search, Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Android, YouTube, Google Drive and Google Play Store. All of the data collected by those services is infinitely valuable to advertisers. The company also boasts significant non-ad businesses, such as Cloud and Google Play, and hardware products such as Google Home, Nest and the Pixel smartphone. And let’s not forget about Alphabet’s Other Bets — the moon-shot products that, if successful, could be huge boons for the company and its shareholders. These include Fiber high-speed internet, Verily life sciences products, Waymo self-driving vehicles, Calico human longevity solutions, and Alphabet’s investment and venture-capital funding groups. Alphabet shares were recently trading at a forward-looking priceto-earnings (P/E) ratio of 22. While that may not sound like a screaming value play, consider that Alphabet is sitting on a net cash position of $115 billion — equal to about one-sixth of its market value. (The Motley Fool owns shares of and has recommended Alphabet (A and C shares).)