Google Inc. announced plans to create a new public holding company, Alphabet Inc., and a new operating structure to increase management scale and focus on its consolidated businesses. Under the new operating structure, its main Google business will include search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android and the related technical infrastructure (the “Google business”).
Businesses such as Calico, Nest, and Fiber, as well as its investing arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital, and incubator projects, such as Google X, will be managed separately from the Google business.
In connection with the new operating structure and upon completion of the Alphabet Merger (as defined below), Larry Page will become the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alphabet, Sergey Brin will become the President of Alphabet, Eric E. Schmidt will become the Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Ruth Porat will become the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Alphabet and David C. Drummond will become the Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary of Alphabet.
Concurrently upon completion of the Alphabet Merger, Sundar Pichai, will become the new CEO of Google Inc.
Later this year, Google intends to implement a holding company reorganization (the “Alphabet Merger”), which will result in Alphabet owning all of the capital stock of Google.
Alphabet will initially be a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Google.
Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Accordingly, upon consummation of the Alphabet Merger, Google’s current stockholders will become stockholders of Alphabet.
Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity. The two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
Alphabet will also include the X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, Google’s drone delivery effort.
The new company has issued the world’s best Easter Egg on its home page. Just go to the home page and read the full report and click at the period that comes after “drone delivery effort,” you’ll find a link to the HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’. Thus you can see the hidden “Hooli Easter Egg.”
Step one: go to http://t.co/mK7lm118Ee Step two: click the period after “drone delivery effort. Step three: enjoy. pic.twitter.com/2y0HguSVSM
— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) August 10, 2015
What is Alphabet?
“We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!” Larry Page said in a blogpost.
Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of the main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead.
The new company Alphabet does not have the .com url but instead it has https://abc.xyz/. As Forbes reported, “It is worth noting, however, that the new company will not be able to use the URL http://www.alphabet.com. That’s currently held by Alphabet Inc., the international fleet management division of BMW Group.”
About Sundar Pichai
Sundar is currently the Senior Vice President of Products at Google and oversees product management, engineering, and research efforts for Google’s products and platforms. Since joining Google in 2004, Sundar has led a number of key consumer products which are now used by hundreds of millions of people and, prior to his current role, served as Google’s SVP of Android, Chrome and Apps.
Google itself is also making all sorts of new products, and Sundar will always be focused on innovation — continuing to stretch boundaries. Recent launches like Google Photos and Google Now using machine learning are amazing progress. Google also has some services that are run with their own identity, like YouTube.
