Co-founder Sergey Brin will be president of Alphabet, while the highly rated Sundar Pichai appears to be the biggest victor, taking the reins as chief executive of what might be termed “classic flavour” Google.
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In a memo to investors, Page said he wants to make the company “cleaner and more accountable”.
“This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead”, Page wrote. Good examples are our health efforts: “Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity)”.
He said Mr. Pichai will be a “key part” of the new structure that will “allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside Google“.
Google Inc.’s announcement that it will split into two companies, under a holding company called Alphabet, was viewed by analysts as an acknowledgement of the lack of transparency surrounding its disparate businesses and projects.
As with any new company you would expect a new website, and one can assume Page and Brin to choose the Internet domain of the same name as their new holding company.
Alphabet will be a giant conglomerate, of which the largest will be Google itself.
Another reason they went for the name, he adds, is “that it means alpha-bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for!” “We [have done] a lot of things that seemed insane at the time”, Page said, noting that the Alphabet strategy gives Google more flexibility to innovate.
Google shares rose more than 3 percent in Tuesday trading.
Under the new setup, Google will have Sundar Pichai, who is the Senior Vice President of Product, as its new CEO. The Google unit will include the search engine, search ads, maps, apps, YouTube, Android and related technical operations, according to the filing.
Google just announced a major overhaul of its corporate structure.
Alphabet will continue to trade under the GOOGL and GOOG ticker symbols when the change kicks in later this year. Both Page and Brin will be exclusively responsible for determining the compensation of the CEOs in each spin-off company and they’ve introduced segment reporting for Google’s Q4 results, where the internet company’s financials will be provided separately from the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole.
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On the reverse, there had been concerns that the dominance of Google in its sector had reached its peak.
