In light of our earlier article on Facebook, we now move on to another company that has a significant economic moat: Alphabet – the parent company of Google. What is more powerful than having a brand inducted into the dictionary as a verb? Google has effectively monopolized the online advertising market, facing legal battles in Europe over its dominance in the market. Alphabet is perhaps one of the easiest companies to identify a moat due to its overarching dominance in its respective market.

Industry

Google has total dominance in search but in the broader technology industry they do have other impressive services and products. One such service is Android, with a substantial 51.04% (vs iOS’s 40.83%) of mobile operating system market share. Search is so important to Alphabet that it paid Apple US$1 billion just to keep its search bar on iPhone devices. In short, one can assume ......