Google Inc is likely to buy more companies about the size of YouTube and DoubleClick, its two largest acquisitions, to help offer more online services, the company’s head of mergers and acquisitions said.
“The world changes really quickly, and companies that were small two years ago are huge today,” David Lawee, vice president of corporate development at the Mountain View, California-based Google, said in an interview on Thursday. “It wouldn’t surprise me to see more large opportunities for us.”
Google has stepped up its dealmaking this year, spending US$1.6 billion on more than 20 companies in the first nine months of the year, according to regulatory filings. Its acquisition of mobile ad service AdMob Inc and a pending bid to acquire travel data aggregator ITA Software Inc, both for about US$700 million, would be the company’s third and fourth-largest deals since it went public in 2004.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Google, which runs the largest Internet search engine, is increasingly turning to acquisitions to expand into new businesses and fill its ranks with top entrepreneurs. Keeping the founders of those startups motivated to stay and help improve their products is a major factor in the success of acquisitions, Lawee said.
“These people have a very strong passion around what they are doing and a vision for getting it done,” said Lawee, 44. “The skills that those people bring are often subtle, but their effect is profound.”
AdMob founder Omar Hamoui left Google five months after the purchase of his company was complete, Google said on Oct. 29. Chad Hurley, YouTube’s co-founder, and Lars Rasmussen, whose Where 2 Technologies was acquired in 2004 and became the basis for Google Maps, both announced plans to step down in the past two weeks.
Google paid US$1.65 billion for YouTube, the world’s biggest video-sharing site, in 2006. It acquired DoubleClick, an online advertising company, for US$3.2 billion in 2008.
When asked if Google would buy more companies of the size of those businesses, Lawee said: “Yes.”
In related news, Google’s data collection practices may draw scrutiny from the next US Congress, as lawmakers consider questioning Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, US Representative Joe Barton said.
“The Google thing is very -troubling,” Barton, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in an interview on the C-Span television show The Communicators.
Google said automobiles equipped with cameras to collect photographs for its Street View product, captured personal data from unsecured household wireless networks. The US Federal Trade Commission last month ended its investigation of the practice after the company said it will improve privacy safeguards.
Asked if chief executives from companies such as Google and Facebook Inc, led by founder Mark Zuckerberg, would be called before the Commerce Committee, Barton replied: “You could almost guarantee that.”
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