Google Inc. in 2014 Custom Case Solution & Analysis

Evidence Brief

Financial Metrics

Total Revenue 2013: 59.82 billion dollars (Exhibit 1).
Net Income 2013: 12.92 billion dollars (Exhibit 1).
Advertising Revenue: 50.57 billion dollars, representing 84.5 percent of total revenue (Exhibit 1).
Cash and Marketable Securities: 58.72 billion dollars (Exhibit 1).
Research and Development Expense: 7.95 billion dollars, approximately 13 percent of revenue (Exhibit 1).
Cost of Revenues: 25.64 billion dollars (Exhibit 1).
Effective Tax Rate: 15.7 percent (Exhibit 1).
Operating Margin: 23 percent (Exhibit 1).

Operational Facts

Search Market Share: 67.5 percent in the United States and approximately 90 percent in Europe (Exhibit 11).
Android Platform: 81 percent global smartphone market share (Exhibit 12).
YouTube: Over 1 billion monthly unique visitors (Paragraph 14).
Headcount: 47,756 full time employees (Exhibit 1).
Infrastructure: 13 major data centers across four continents (Paragraph 22).
Hardware Transition: Sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for 2.91 billion dollars while retaining the patent portfolio (Paragraph 31).
Acquisitions: Purchase of Nest Labs for 3.2 billion dollars in cash (Paragraph 33).

Stakeholder Positions

Larry Page (CEO): Prioritizes solving massive problems through Moonshot projects and long term thinking (Paragraph 5).
Sergey Brin: Focuses on Google X initiatives including self driving cars and wearable technology (Paragraph 6).
Eric Schmidt: Concentrates on global government relations and regulatory discussions (Paragraph 6).
Wall Street Analysts: Express concern over rising capital expenditures and the decline in cost per click due to mobile migration (Paragraph 42).
Advertisers: Demanding better attribution tools for cross device consumer behavior (Paragraph 45).

Information Gaps

Specific profitability and margin data for the YouTube segment.
Breakdown of revenue for Google Cloud Platform relative to competitors.
Detailed unit economics for the Nest hardware division.
Retention rates for enterprise customers using Google Apps for Business.

Strategic Analysis

Core Strategic Question

How can Google protect its advertising profit engine while the consumer transition to mobile app environments threatens the visibility of the search engine?
How should the company balance massive investment in speculative Moonshots against the need for margin stability in the core business?

Structural Analysis

The competitive landscape is shifting from open web search to closed app environments. Porter Five Forces analysis reveals significant changes:

Threat of Substitutes: High. Consumers increasingly start product searches on Amazon and travel searches on Expedia. These vertical search engines bypass the general search bar of Google.
Bargaining Power of Buyers: High. Advertisers can shift budgets to Facebook for targeted social display or to mobile ad networks with higher conversion rates.
Competitive Rivalry: Intense. Apple controls the iOS gateway and can change default search providers. Microsoft continues to subsidize Bing to maintain a foothold in the PC market.

Strategic Options

Option 1: Mobile Deep Linking and App Indexing.

Rationale: Ensure that search remains the primary discovery tool by indexing content inside mobile apps.
Trade-offs: Requires deep technical cooperation from competitors who may prefer to keep their data silos closed.
Requirements: Significant engineering resources dedicated to the mobile search experience.

Option 2: Enterprise and Cloud Acceleration.

Rationale: Diversify revenue away from a 90 percent dependence on advertising.
Trade-offs: Requires a fundamental shift from an engineering-centric culture to a customer-service and sales-centric culture.
Requirements: Massive expansion of the direct sales force and global data center footprint.

Option 3: Hardware and Ambient Computing.

Rationale: Control the hardware layer via Nest and wearable devices to ensure constant data collection.
Trade-offs: Lower margins and higher operational complexity compared to software.
Requirements: Mastery of supply chain management and retail distribution.

Preliminary Recommendation

Google must prioritize Option 1 and Option 2. Protecting the search moat in the mobile era is the immediate priority. Simultaneously, scaling the cloud business provides the only viable path to meaningful revenue diversification that matches the scale of the advertising business.

Implementation Roadmap

Critical Path

Month 1 to 3: Launch enhanced app indexing for Android to prove the utility of deep linking to developers.
Month 4 to 6: Restructure the sales organization to bundle Google Cloud with existing enterprise productivity tools.
Month 7 to 12: Integrate Nest data into the unified user profile to improve ad targeting and personalized assistance.

Key Constraints

Regulatory Scrutiny: Antitrust investigations in Europe may limit the ability of the company to bundle services or prioritize its own products in search results.
Engineering Allocation: The internal preference for working on Moonshots may drain talent from the essential task of improving mobile ad conversion.
Privacy Restrictions: New data protection laws could limit the ability to track users across devices, which is central to the mobile strategy.

Risk-Adjusted Implementation Strategy

To mitigate execution risk, the company should adopt a dual track approach. The core search and cloud teams must operate under strict performance metrics focused on margin preservation and market share. The Moonshot projects should be moved into a separate corporate structure with