Google's Q4 profit drops 68% to $382M US

Google Inc.'s fourth-quarter profit fell to $382 million US, down 68 per cent from the same period a year ago, but still beat analysts' expectations, the company announced Thursday.

Earnings amounted to $1.21 per share, compared with $1.21 billion or $3.79 a share for the same quarter in 2007. All figures are in U.S. dollars.

Profit was dragged down by employee stock compensation costs and charges for deteriorating investments in Cleanwire Corp. and AOL.

Excluding one-time charges, Google said it would have made $5.10 per share. That topped the average estimate of $4.95 per share by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Revenue totalled $5.7 billion, up 18 per cent from the same quarter a year ago.

The results indicated that Google was able to rein in its free-spending ways enough to offset a slowdown in the online ad market, which generates most of the revenue.

With the U.S. economy mired in its longest recession since the early 1980s, Google has been curtailing employee perquisites, scrapping little-used products and even jettisoning some workers after a five-year hiring spree.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it's getting out of the business of selling print ads for the newspaper industry, effective Feb. 28, as part of a cost-cutting program in the face of the recession.

Shares of Google closed up $3.42 to $306.50 US on the Nasdaq stock market, and rose a further $5.50 in after-hours trading.

With files from the Associated Press