Tech companies have released their Q1 2017 profit figures. It looks as though the quarter was a successful one for various big name companies including Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Intel. Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, saw quarterly profits of 5.4 billion US dollars, up 28% on the same period last year. It attributed the growth to higher levels of ad spend on mobile and YouTube ads. Microsoft's profits also grew by 28%, to 4.8 billion US dollars. This was driven largely by increased sales of its cloud computing products, which are increasingly being used by large and small businesses alike. The ecommerce giant Amazon saw its profits rise by an impressive 40% to 724 million US dollars. The growth was put down to the company's international expansion to the UK, India and Mexico, as well as the success of its Amazon Prime subscription service. The chip manufacturer Intel saw its profits grow by 45% to 2.9 billion US dollars, with most of this being driven by new products from the company's memory division.Â
