Google now officially Alphabet

This Friday when the markets closed, Google was replaced by Alphabet. Alphabet will be now the publicly traded company housing Google Search, Maps and web advertising business and YouTube ventures. Class A and Class C shares of Google have been automatically converted in to Alphabet’s Class A and C shares that will start trading starting this Monday on Nasdaq. However, there won’t be any change of the ticker symbols. This structure overhaul was announced this year in august. The purpose was to separate the several ventures such as glucose – monitoring contact lenses, internet connected balloons and driverless cars from the core business of the company.

The Sidewalk Labs of Google is a company that brings up new technologies for improving the city infrastructure (for example, free Wi-Fi ). This would also be included in the Alphabet business. From now on Google will mean only the core business and will be operated as a subsidiary of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai will remain the head of Google. However, Google co-founder Larry Page will be running Alphabet. One chief executive will be assigned to each of Alphabet’s businesses. Starting late in January, there will be two reporting units for Alphabet – one is Google and second include all other businesses. Investors have highly supported this move as they say it will give them greater visibility of Google’s financial performance.

Alphabet will also include Google Capital, Nest and Google Ventures. Minutes after listing on Nasdaq, Aphabet’s shares jumped up. Class A shares went up by 1 percent and Class C shares by 2 percent. The number of outstanding shares as well as the stock code has been kept the same. Each Google share accounts for one Alphabet share.

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