No. of Recommendations: 14
Even looking at the P/S ratio, rather than the P/E during times of high margins, Google is still cheap today!
Though I agree with your bullish outlook, I do expect their net margins to drift down over time, partly because of the huge ongoing costs of the new data centres to support the more compute intensive LLM-like services. You could view that as meaning that the fair P/S ratio is declining over time, or that the logic of using (cyclically adjusted) earnings rather than sales as one's metric is becoming more compelling over time. These long term trends were always going to be true at some point--six times sales was never going to be a great rule of thumb forever. But the time may be sooner than it once looked. Their depreciation charges, which are very real expenses, are going to slow the profit giant a fair bit.
Still, even if they never grew again, one would still do fine. If earnings stayed in real terms at the estimated 2025 level forever, returns from here ($146.75 close) would still be a long run earnings yield of inflation + 6.1%/year with what I would consider absolutely minimal risk. That's not a worst case scenario (worst case is always an asteroid strike), but that's a pretty good result from a pretty bad future forecast.
Jim
