Although on the market of mobile terminals, and not only, Google and Apple are direct competitors, both companies need each other to be able to offer users full functionality for their own products. Google is the largest search engine on the Internet, Safari is the most used browser for browsing the Internet on iDevices and Macs, and annually the company Google Checkout $1 billion to be Safari's default search engine. The money that Google pays to Apple ensures its presence in Safari for Mac and iOS, and the company from Mountain View has a lot to gain.
Apple made $1 billion off Google last year by having it as the default search engine in Safari, says Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter in a note this morning. Schachter believes Google searches on Apple devices resulted in $1.3 billion in gross revenue. He believes Google has a 75% traffic acquisition cost associated with that revenue. As a result, Google only gets $335 million in net revenue from searches on iOS and Safari.
Last year Google collected over 1.3 billion dollars only from searches made on Safari and we are talking about over 300 million dollars that remain with Google following the partnership with Apple. The figures represent almost a third of what Google pays to Apple, but for the company from Mountain View we are talking about making a profit that might not have been that big. Of course, Apple licenses the Google Maps system from Google plus many others, so each company pays the other considerable sums of money for services.
