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R_www.washingtonpost.com_business_technology 2015 00707.txt.txt

#Google becomes part of a new company, Alphabet Google chief executive Larry page on Monday announced that the tech giant is undergoing a major restructuring and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of a new conglomerate known as Alphabet. The move, Page said, will allow Google to focus more on its core products, including its search engine, while Alphabet manages a variety of different businesses, including driverless cars and drones.""What is Alphabet?""Page wrote.""Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is slimmed a bit down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead.""Other companies within Alphabet will include Calico and Life sciences, the parts of Google that focus on health products. Page said the company's X lab, which focuses on moon-shot projects such as Google's drone delivery service, also will be part of Alphabet, as will its investment arms, Ventures and Capital. The move comes as Google struggles to maintain focus as its portfolio grows and its interests spread across various industries. That sprawl has attracted recently criticism from investors, who wondered whether the company could remain innovative with so many distractions. Page will be chief executive of Alphabet while Google cofounder Sergey Brin will become president. Sundar Pichai, who is Google's senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps, will become Google's chief executive. Page said, "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.""The company's two classes of shares will continue to trade on the Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG, he said. So what stays a part of the core Google business? According to the company's Securities and exchange commission filing, the main Google business will include"search, ads, maps, apps, Youtube and Android, "as well as the technical infrastructure for those departments. Most of the top Google executives will become Alphabet executives, the filing said. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Chief Financial officer Ruth Porat and chief legal officer David Drummond will take up corresponding positions within Alphabet. Porat will also remain the CFO of Google. Google, one of the few companies to actually become a verb, hardly needs introduction. The firm was started by Larry page and Sergey Brin in 1997 after the two met as students at Stanford university. Before Google, the two worked together on a search engine called Backrub, which they operated on the servers at Stanford for more than a year. The pair registered the domain name"Google. com"on Sept. 17,1998, with the mission to organize all of the world's information. The company went public in 2004. It is worth $443. 9 billion and handles an estimated 67 percent of the country's desktop searches and 83 percent of its mobile searches, according to Comscore. Internationally, Netmarketshare puts Google's global desktop search share at 70 percent. While the company has held always search at its core it has expanded into several different areas. Investors and analysts have criticized Google in recent years for spending so much on these"side projects "and have called repeatedly on Page to streamline Google's purpose. Google shares were up more than 5 percent in after-hours trading on the news, at $665. 99 per share. p

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