Alphabet reported today in its annual earnings call that the company's fiscal Q4 was a bit of a dismal one, owing to a decision to provision a new tax on foreign assets ahead into the 2017 fiscal year. Basically, Google took a $9.9 billion tax hit in the last quarter of 2017, dramatically lowering the effective net income the company earned for the whole of the fiscal year.

Google lost $3 billion in Q4, but for 2017 overall, it managed net income of $12.7 billion on revenues of $110.8 billion. While net income is down versus 2016 ($19.5 billion), revenues are way up - around 23%. Google also reported on the call that it "doubled" its hardware shipments in 2017 versus 2016, though considering this includes the often-$29 Google Home Mini alongside Google's far more expensive smartphones, that's kind of a meaningless statistic.

You can check out the full earnings report here. As of this writing, Google's stock is down slightly in after hours trading, but the news doesn't seem to have spooked investors too much, given the cause of the precipitous drop in profit was basically a tax accounting decision.

Source: Alphabet