Larry Page yesterday made a major announcement. He revealed that he is now the now the CEO of “Alphabet,” a brand-new company of which Google is just one part.
Page will be CEO of Alphabet, and fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin will be helping him run Alphabet in some capacity. Sundar Pichai is now the CEO of the subsidiary known as Google.
Alphabet Inc. is to 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. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet.
Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.” All the Alphabet subsidiaries, including Google, will be using “segment reporting” to report their financial results separately as well.
Other initiatives, which Page describes as “far afield of our main Internet products,” will be subsidiaries of Alphabet with “a strong CEO who runs each business.”
The Life Sciences division, which is responsible for that smart contact lens concept among other things;Calico, which “aim[s] to devise interventions that slow aging and counteract age-related diseases”; and the experimental X lab as subsidiaries that are now under the Alphabet banner rather than Google’s.
However, don’t expect the Alphabet brand to replace Google’s or any of the other Alphabet subsidiaries’ on any products—you won’t be using Alphabet Mail or Alphabet Chrome any time soon, in other words. “The whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands,” he said.
[Via]
