Credit: Sasun Bughdaryan via Unsplash https://unsplash.com/@sasun1990
The world’s three biggest digital advertising players -- Google, Meta and Amazon -- pulled in $3.37 billion in sales from Australia last year.
Financials lodged with corporate regulator ASIC, show Google Australia topped the league for advertising sales.
Google Australia reported a 1.3% drop in revenue to $1.981 billion in the year to December, according to filings made to the corporate regulator ASIC.
Facebook Australia, Meta’s local company, reported an 8.5% increase in advertising sales in 2024 to more than $1.45 billion.
Amazon’s advertising business in Australia lifted net sales 58% to $242.5 million in the year to December.
The general thrust of how the local companies of global digital platforms work is that they act as sales agents for their parent companies.
And so revenue is judged not by total sales but by the commission the parent company, or an offshore subsidiary, allows the local entity to keep before remitting the bulk.
Google Australia Pty Ltd acts as a reseller of advertising for a Singapore subsidiary, Google Asia Pacific Pte, of the US-based company.
The local Australian company booked profit after tax at $341,039,000, up from $319,156,000 the previous year, and paid income tax of $83 million, or about 4% of sales of almost $2 billion.
The 2190 local employees were paid $990.333 million. Of that $222.412 million was share-based payments.
Over at Meta, Facebook Australia booked advertising sales of $1.45 billion but the local company only kept $206.291 million of that. The rest ended up offshore.
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