Google’s parent Alphabet experienced another quarter of strong revenue growth during Q4 2016, as CFO Ruth Porat (pictured) said the company “has only begun to scratch the surface” in mobile search, YouTube and automated advertising.

In an earnings call, Porat said the company remained excited about “sizeable opportunities that have not been tapped” in the three areas, while there was also a big focus by both Porat and CEO Sundar Pichai on the company’s other businesses, including subscriptions to YouTube for premium content, and its cloud and hardware units.

Porat said all three could become “major revenue drivers for Google in the next several years”.

However, in the immediate term, mobile search and YouTube advertising continues to drive a huge chunk of the company’s growth.

It reported net income of $5.3 billion for Q4, up 8 per cent from $4.9 billion in the final quarter of the prior year. This was on revenue of $26.1 billion, up from $21.3 billion, which was largely driven by the core Google business.

The company noted profit was lower than expected due to higher tax adjustment.

Google’s advertising revenue rose roughly 17 per cent from $19 billion in Q4 2015 to $22.4 billion in the recent quarter, making up a large chunk of the growth during the period. Overall, Google’s revenue hit $25.8 billion, from $21.2 billion in the 2015 quarter.

“Our growth in the fourth quarter was exceptional,” said Porat. “We’re seeing great momentum in Google’s newer investment areas and ongoing strong progress in Other Bets.”

Other Bets
The company’s Other Bets division includes long-term projects including its self driving car unit Waymo and connected device platform Nest. The quarter saw the unit shrink operating loss from $1.2 billion in Q4 2015 to $1.1 billion in the recent period. Revenue grew to $262 million in from $150 million the previous year.

The company’s long term ambitions are also heavily based on Artificial Intelligence and embedding machine learning into its activities.

Pichai added that “2016 was the year machine learning became central to who we are as a company, and the products we develop”.