Google Chairman Eric Schmidt just took the stage at the Le Web conference to chat about Android, the search giant’s expansion and more. When he was asked about why the search engine hadn’t acquired any French companies, Schmidt jokingly commented on stage that Google was now buying around one company day.
That’s clearly a lot of companies to purchase even for a company with deep pockets like Google. So our intrepid reporter Alexia Tsotsis ran backstage to confirm this, where Schmidt told her on the record that Google was actually acquiring around one company per week. “But why do you never announce them?” she asked him. “We don’t have to,” he said.
As revealed in October, this year Google has spent $1.4 billion on 57 acquisitions this year. So yes, with 52 weeks in a year, that sounds about right. Of course, Google has been particularly aggressive with its acquisitions this year, especially in the mobile, social, and search areas. We’ll have to see if the search giant will continue its acquisitive strategy in 2012, or scale back.
All jokes aside, with $43 billion in cash, clearly the company has room to up the ante and start buying a company per day.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
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