Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings report proved that shares of the Google parent and its fellow tech titans could still head higher, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on Tuesday.
The reason why came to Cramer halfway through Alphabet’s conference call, when CEO Sundar Pichai answered a question about Google’s prevalence in society.
“We want Google to be the source you think of when you run into a problem,” Pichai told analysts and shareholders.
That struck Cramer as the driving factor for success in all of FANG, namely the stocks of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet.
“Before you chastise me for saying Alphabet and these other FANG stocks deserve to be higher, remember: If they solve problems for the whole world and they can create value for billions more people, then we should stop wondering if the stocks are too high and start asking ourselves if they’re too low,” the “Mad Money” host said.
Alphabet’s services, for example, solve a host of potential problems. Google Search helps billions of people access information; Google Maps helps people find their way; Google Translate helps people speak to one another.
“Who hasn’t run into problems? Who wouldn’t want an unbiased, trusted source to help solve those problems?” Cramer said. “We’re talking all seven billion people on earth, or at least the ones with internet access, a number that’s growing by the day, and that’s exactly the addressable market that Google’s shooting for.”
Few other companies can solve problems in this “particularly digital way” without serious competition besides Amazon, Netflix and Facebook, Cramer argued.
Amazon uses e-commerce to solve the problem of getting people what they want when they want it. Netflix uses online streaming to solve the problem of entertaining consumers.
“Facebook solves a problem you didn’t even know you had: the problem of self-expression and keeping in touch via that self-expression,” Cramer said. “It’s not identity theft; it’s identity creation.”
These tech giants’ specializations have set them so far apart from their competitors that multi-billion-dollar fines or high operating costs hardly matter in the grand scheme of what they can achieve, the “Mad Money” host added, pointing to a quote from Alphabet’s Chief Financial Officer, Ruth Porat:
“Ninety percent of commerce is still offline and we do see a great opportunity for digital to play a bigger role,” she said on the conference call.
“If a company is only 10 percent into its total addressable market, you’d call it early,” Cramer said. “Which is why, even though Alphabet has an $870 billion market cap, I still think it’s got room to run.”
Shares of Alphabet hit a new all-time high on Tuesday as Wall Street digested its earnings report, with the stock closing up 3.89 percent at $1,258.15 a share. Facebook’s stock reached an all-time intraday high, closing up 1.78 percent at $214.67 a share. Shares of Amazon rose 1.5 percent, settling at $1,829.24. Shares of Netflix sank 1.47 percent, closing at $357.32.
