I
Google Strategy
Teardown
GO O GLE IS TURNING I T SELF IN T O AN AI
CO MPAN Y AS I T SEEKS T O WIN NEW M ARKE T S
LIKE CLO UD AND TRANSPO R TATIO N
II
Google’s next big thing will likely come from
one of its new priority areas, like cloud,
transportation, and healthcare. Each has a
massive, global addressable market and plays
well to Google’s strength in AI.
As the digital world evolves, Google is taking a multi-pronged
approach to maintaining its dominance in the search and ad
business, which makes up the vast majority of its revenue.
Search is migrating across mediums, with users gradually moving
from desktop to mobile devices and voice assistants — a shift
that directly threatens Google’s moat in search and advertising.
As competition rises in the mobile and digital assistant space,
and concerns over privacy and data management mount, Google
has been forced to adapt.
To maintain its foothold and protect its main source of revenue,
Alphabet (Google’s parent company) is positioning itself to
dominate adjacent sectors — such as digital commerce, branded
hardware products, and content — and attempting to integrate its
services into every aspect of the digital user experience.
The company is also seeking out new streams of revenue in
sectors with large addressable markets, namely on the enterprise
side with cloud computing and services. Furthermore, it’s looking
at industries ripe for disruption, such as transportation, logistics,
and healthcare.
Unifying Alphabet’s approach across initiatives is its expertise
in AI and machine learning, which the company believes will help
it become an all-encompassing service for both consumers
and enterprises.
In this teardown, we dive into Google’s multi-pronged approach to
maintaining its search platform dominance, outlining the strategic
investments, acquisitions, and partnerships across
its top priorities moving forward.
III
Alphabet’s structure and background
Google’s priorities:
AI centricity: Embrace an AI-centric approach
and solidify lead in machine learning
Cloud: Grow share in the cloud market
Computing: Build out a network infrastructure
for computing
Advertising: Protect advertising business from rising
competition in digital — especially from Amazon
Emerging markets: Expand in India & Southeast Asia,
rebuild presence in China
Transportation & logistics: Disrupt the transportation
and logistics industry
Healthcare: Push healthcare forward through data
and AI
Conclusion
IV
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Table of
contents
IV
Alphabet’s structure
and background
Alphabet is broken out into its core Google business and a
number of other subsidiaries, which it deems “Other Bets.”
The majority of Google’s business comes from advertising
revenues, which the company generates through its search
engine as well as a number of other Google-affiliated and
partnership websites.
Outside of search and advertising, Google generates revenue
from products including cloud and enterprise, consumer
hardware, mapping, and YouTube.
In addition to Google, Alphabet encompasses a host of other
subsidiaries called “Other Bets.” These companies are more
experimental in nature, and as a result are not material to
Alphabet’s bottom line.
V
Google’s Other Bets include:

· GV and capitalG, two of Google’s investment vehicles

· Waymo, Google’s self-driving car initiative

· Verily and Calico, two healthcare subsidiaries

· Alphabet Access & Energy, which houses the company’s
telecommunications projects and energy initiatives

· Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization

· DeepMind, an AI research arm acquired by Google in 2014 that
has the company develop neural networks

· Cybersecurity spinoff Chronicle, which focuses on security
solutions for Google’s cloud business

· Project Loon, a subsidiary working to bring internet access to
rural and remote areas

· Project Wing, which is developing an autonomous delivery
drone service

· Google X, an R&D facility focused on “moonshot” technologies
aimed at improving the world
Given that Google makes up the vast majority of Alphabet’s
business, the company’s initiatives across subsidiaries
have largely focused on protecting Google’s moat in search
and advertising.
In recent quarters, the company has seen notable increases
in traffic acquisition costs (TAC), which is the largest cost
associated with Google’s main stream of revenue, ad and search.
As the company faces increasing regulation (e.g. the EU’s $5B
fine on Android) and an ongoing shift to mobile from desktop,
TAC is expected to rise.
In addition to rising TAC, competition is growing from peers like
Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, all of which are racing to capitalize
on a growing digital economy to capture data and access new
streams of revenue.
As a result, Google is doing everything in its power to capitalize
on potential growth areas and maintain its foothold in search
and advertising.
Below, we outline the company’s main priorities, detailing the
initiatives, investments, and acquisitions across its subsidiaries.
1
Embrace an AI-centric
approach and solidify lead
in machine learning
Artificial intelligence is critical to Alphabet’s long-term outlook.
AI is the thread that runs through search & advertising, cloud,
autonomous driving, healthcare, and a host of the company’s
Other Bets, as we’ll outline futher below.

What It’s Doing Now
In a keynote presentation to launch Google’s new high-end Pixel
smartphones in October 2016, CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the
importance of artificial intelligence to the tech landscape moving
forward, explaining, “It is clear to me we are evolving from a
mobile-first to an AI-first world.”
Since then, AI has become the company’s focus across its
investments, acquisitions, and internal spending.
Investments
Google has launched two funds dedicated solely to AI: Gradient
Ventures and the Google Assistant Investment Program.
Gradient Ventures was launched in July 2017. Unlike GV and
capitalG, which run separately from Google under the Alphabet
corporate framework, Gradient Ventures is accounted for on
Google’s balance sheet. That said, the fund plans to break off
from the main company once it ramps up its investment pace.
So far, Gradient has only invested in early-stage deals, primarily
focusing on the US — though a recent investment was in Canada-
based Benchsci, a medical sciences startup using AI to accelerate
biomedical discoveries.
Google has also launched a fund to build out its capabilities for
Google Assistant, Google’s virtual assistant that uses natural
language processing to take voice commands from users and
search the internet, schedule events, set alarms, among a host of
other tasks. Launched in May, the Google Assistant Investment
Program is focused specifically on early-stage startups working
with Google’s virtual assistant.
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Google is also investing internally in its machine learning
capabilities by ramping up its R&D spend, which it largely
dedicates to its main areas of strategic focus (such as search
and machine learning). In 2017, Google tracked at the high-end
of FAMGA in terms of R&D spend in absolute dollars as well as
relative to sales.
The company has also ramped up its capex spend, which largely
funds its computing infrastructure. (We outline this in further
detail below.)
Acquisitions
In addition to investing through its new investment vehicles and
more established funds, Google has also been actively acquiring
AI startups for the past few years.
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One of the company’s initial forays into AI and machine
learning was its $600M acquisition of AI startup DeepMind
in January 2014. DeepMind currently operates as a subsidiary
of Alphabet, and has been a pioneer in the machine learning
space, with its program beating a human world champion in
the board game “Go.”
More recently, the company acquired Halli Labs, an India-based
AI startup focused on deep learning and machine learning
systems, and AIMatter, a computer vision company using a neural
network-based AI platform to process images. The company
also acquired Banter in November 2017 to build out its natural
language processing capabilities for enterprise cloud services
like Google Hangouts.
Product launches
Google has heavily emphasized the importance of building
a superior digital assistant. The company is facing rising
competition from Amazon and Apple, both of whom have
launched their own virtual assistants. This poses a significant
threat to Google’s core business, as every voice-based search
that consumers perform using Alexa or Siri takes business
away from Google’s search platform.
In terms of scaling its digital assistant, Google CEO Sundar
Pichai has said that the company is working with “every major
device brand” in the US to cover a wide range of products, from
dishwashers to security systems.
Google’s first smart home hub with a screen, manufactured by Lenovo.
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Google is also buildling out its own hardware manufacturing
capabilities for its in-house products, known as the Made by
Google line. This includes the Pixel smartphone, the Chromebook
laptop, and the Google Home smart home device.
A number of Google’s recent investments and acquisitions have
been focused on building out its hardware capabilities, most
notably its $1.1B acquisition of hardware manufacturer HTC’s
smartphone division in September 2017. With the deal, Google
gained access to HTC’s hardware engineers and also established
a manufacturing presence in Taiwan.
Patents
The main engine for Google’s internal research on AI and machine
learning is Google AI. Formerly known as Google Research,
the project was recently re-branded to reflect the company’s
newfound focus on AI.
Within Google AI sits the Google Brain team, which has led the
charge in developing TensorFlow, Google’s open-source software
library. The team also improves core capabilities from translation
to voice search.
Google Brain works closely with a number of Alphabet’s
subsidiaries, including autonomous driving division Waymo,
where it has helped apply deep neural nets to vehicles’ pedestrian
detection system. The team has also made inroads in the energy
space, helping Google realize cost and environmental savings at
its power-hungry data centers to improve power usage efficiency
by 15%.
The team has been highly-focused on AI and machine learning,
evidenced by a jump in AI-related patent activity starting in 2016.
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Google is also focused on building out its deep learning
capabilities, which is more complex than traditional machine
learning in that it generates predictions using an artificial
neural network inspired by the human brain. Unlike machine
learning, deep learning algorithms do not require adjustments
from engineers and should be able to determine on their own if
predictions are accurate or not.
Google’s emerging focus on deep learning can be seen in the
company’s top patent keywords (pictured below). “Neural network”
was first mentioned in 2015 and has since climbed to become
one of the top 3 most frequently mentioned terms.
Note: Patterned columns may be incomplete due to the delay between patent filing
and publication.
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Google has also focused heavily on speech recognition and
natural language processing. The company’s IP activity around
voice has outpaced FAMGA historically.
In 2016, Google’s patent activity related to speech recognition
reaccelerated, reflecting the company’s mission to dominate the
digital assistant market.
Beyond speech recognition, another area related to digital
assistants is gesture recognition. In recent months, Google has
upped its IP activity in the gesture recognition field.
Note: Patterned columns may be incomplete due to the delay between patent filing
and publication.
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Google’s patents offer clues as to how the company plans
to integrate voice and gesture recognition into its products
in the future.
In October 2017, Google filed a patent for “radar-based gesture
sensing and data transmission.” The technology would allow
users to control a suite of devices using gestures, rather than
just voice or other control devices (like a TV remote or buttons
on a microwave).
Note: Patterned columns may be incomplete due to the delay between patent filing
and publication.
8
This patent hints at Google’s vision for an automated home that
still relies on instructions from a user.

Where It’s Going Next
Google’s recent investments and activity suggest that the com-
pany is prioritizing deep learning and natural language processing
so that it can more effectively process and manage growing
amounts of information from both consumers and enterprises.
As CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O conference, Google
is rethinking “all” of its products for an AI-driven future.
With AI as the priority, the company is focused on developing
sophisticated machine learning capabilities through both outside
investments and in-house development.
News
Based on the CB Insights Trends tool, which aggregates news
mentions across press sources, mentions of Google and AI,
machine learning, or deep learning have picked up substantially
in recent months.
9
On the digital assistant front, Google is making notable headway
to differentiate its assistant from Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri.
Recently, the Google Assistant has been more top-of-mind than
both Alexa and Siri — news mentions of the Google Assistant
outpaced mentions of both virtual assistants for the first time
in its history.
10
Earnings transcripts
Though artificial intelligence has been a key focus for over a year,
Google’s mentions of “AI” and “machine learning” on earnings
calls reached a new peak in Q2’18.
Ultimately, Google wants to “help users get things done” through
a combination of search and assistant. In Q4’17, Pichai noted
that the company has room for improvement on the user
experience end:
“…at a high level the next big evolution
we are doing as part of mobile search
and Assistant is to actually help users
complete actions, to help get things done.
And it’s really hard to do at scale, and
that’s the work we are doing.”

At its I/O conference in May, the company outlined a future
capability for the Assistant: a voice system that can carry out
phone calls on a user’s behalf.
Called Duplex, the technology is the first of its kind among even
the most advanced digital assistants and ushers in a new stage
in the race for voice and AI supremacy.
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The below image — taken from Google’s 2017 patent application
for similar technology — outlines a simplified version of one of
these conversations.
Google’s vision to dominate the smart home market and own the
entire stack of hardware devices ties in closely with the digital
assistant. The company has focused on its presence in hardware
to build out its devices end-to-end, in part to relieve rising costs
from third-party hardware manufacturers and also for more
seamless integration between its software and hardware.
The decision to bring its Nest business back under Google’s
hardware division signals Google’s interest in integrating all
its products with a simple assistant, which would provide
the company with more channels to advertise and provide
information to consumers.
Ultimately, the more Google is able to scale its virtual assistant
technology across its suite of products — in everything from
mobile devices to the Google Home to other connected personal
devices — the better the foothold it will gain in the search and
advertising world.
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Why Is This A Priority?
AI substantially impacts just about all of Alphabet’s
businesses and stands to upend a number of large industries.
By differentiating itself across its businesses through machine
learning, Alphabet can better solidify its dominance in search
and advertising.
Market sizings
The market for AI and machine learning is hard to size, given
that the technology is ubiquitous and has the potential to tackle
inefficiencies across a wide array of industries.
The digital assistants market (which is simpler to size) is
expected to reach $12B by 2024. Additionally, Google’s foray
into smart home devices could tap into an estimated $122B
market by 2022.
Building out the most sophisticated digital assistant helps
strengthen Google’s dominance as a search platform provider.
As a result, search and the Google Assistant — projects that
Pichai said sit at the “heart” of Google’s business — are intricately
tied together in Google’s future strategy.
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Grow share in the
cloud market
Google currently ranks third among cloud providers, after Amazon
and Microsoft. However, the company has built out its presence
in the space through a number of investments, acquisitions, and
internal efforts. It has also launched multiple initiatives to better
compete with other tech giants.
What It’s Doing Now
Though it trails Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud space, Google
has made notable inroads and is currently growing the fastest of
the three services.
On its Q4’17 earnings call, the company announced that its cloud
business is now bringing in $1B per quarter. The number of
cloud deals worth $1M+ that Google has sold more than tripled
between 2016 and 2017, and G Suite, Google’s set of cloud-based
productivity applications, had over 4 million paying customers.
Investments
Google has ramped up internal investments for its cloud business.
For four quarters in a row, the company has attributed its
headcount increases to hires for cloud, including both engineers
and go-to-market strategists.
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CEO Pichai has also attributed rising capex spend — which
includes the cost of data centers, machinery, real estate, and
information technology — to building out the cloud business. As
he detailed on the Q1’17 earnings call:
“On the Cloud stuff, in Q1, our largest
growth in head count and CapEx was in
Cloud. The heavy lifting, I would say, is
around how we meet enterprises in the
market. We have reorganized so we have
one face to the customer. So it’s not
just sales reps. We’ve been thoughtful
about how we have built out the entire
go-to-market organization.”
This heightened spending has driven the company’s capex above
both of its cloud rivals, Amazon and Microsoft.
Google has made a few investments in cloud startups through its
investment funds. Most recently, in March 2017, it participated in
a $14M Series E round to cloud storage startup Avere Systems. In
January 2018, Avere was acquired by Microsoft.
15
Acquisitions
On the M&A front, cloud is Google’s primary focus, as it veers
away from its historical preference for moonshots (e.g. AR/
VR, space exploration). As Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat noted in an
interview at Recode’s Code Conference:
“The acquisitions that we’ve talked about
really in particular fill in holes in cloud,
and that’s been really valuable.”

In 2018, the company has already made several acquisitions in
the cloud space, including Cask Data and Velostrata in Q2’18 and
Xively in Q1’18. Its other recent acquisitions in the cloud space
include the following:
Product launches
Google initially built out its enterprise business by focusing on
SMEs, consumers, and students, but it failed to gain traction at
larger, more established enterprises.
Now, Google sees the most opportunity for its cloud business
on the enterprise side. The company brought in VMWare’s Diane
Greene to run its enterprise offering, which has given birth to a
number of enterprise-focused products, including G Suite.
As its built out its enterprise business, the company has landed
several reputable partnerships with major corporations, including
Cisco, Salesforce, and SAP, and is focused on strengthening
its capabilities not just in cloud services but also in its go-to-
market strategy.
16
As CEO Pichai noted on the company’s Q4’17 earnings call:
“These collaborations span our entire
company, from engineering integration
to marketing programs to joint sales,
and they cover Google Cloud Platform,
G Suite, and Google Analytics.”

To gain further ground in the enterprise space, Google launched
a number of new products and services at its Cloud Next
conference this July.
One of the most celebrated releases was Google Cloud
Services, a family of services that allows users to extend the
Google Cloud Platform to in-house servers or edge devices,
catering to businesses that prefer to use a blend of public and
private cloud services.
Google also announced a specialized chip called the Edge TPU,
which can carry out machine learning processes in IoT devices.
The chip is intended for use to manage larger-scale workloads.
Cloud-supported blockchain applications have historically been
a less-explored area for Google. However, at its cloud conference
the company announced the planned integration of blockchain
technology into its cloud platform, through a partnership with
blockchain startups Digital Asset and BlockApps.
Google’s Edge TPU
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Where It’s Going Next
News
Google has successfully established itself as a major player in
the cloud space, with its cloud products increasingly gaining
media mentions, despite still lagging Amazon and Microsoft.
Earnings transcripts
Even though cloud has been top-of-mind for Google for several
years now, mentions of cloud and cloud-related products
reached a new peak in Q2’18, suggesting that the company sees
increasing opportunity in the space.
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Google sees a number of opportunities to leverage its expertise
across other verticals (like content and digital commerce) in order
to get its foot in the door with enterprises facing a growing need
for cloud services.
The company also sees an opportunity for its cloud business
within regulated industries like financial services and healthcare.
When asked about the company’s approach to heavily regulated
industries, CEO Pichai said:
“That’s where a lot of our investments
have gone, getting certifications needed,
depending on the industry and building
the features that you need… And that’s
clearly starting to have an impact,
both on GCP, but as well as G Suite.
We definitely are going to continue to
build out our capabilities. And we’ll be
going after the opportunities in these
areas very seriously.”

Cybersecurity, which is critical for the cloud business,
has become another area of focus for Google and other
tech giants. Google spun off its cybersecurity arm, Chronicle,
from Google X in January 2018 to work on detecting threats
to enterprise security faster that current systems. Ultimately,
the spin off is intended to create what Google X chief Astro
Teller calls a “digital immune system.”

Why Is This A Priority?
An increasing number of businesses are generating more
information, and as a result need incremental computing and
processing power to make sense of it.
All of this will require more complex computing and additional
computing infrastructure, which Google believes it can handle
through its machine learning capabilities.
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Despite trailing behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud space,
Google has an opportunity to capture some business from these
competitors as customers seek expertise in machine learning, an
area where Google remains differentiated.
Market sizing
Google’s presence in the cloud industry allows it to tap into a
number of growing markets in the cloud space, including cloud
computing, which is expected to reach $513B by 2022, and cloud
storage, which is expected to reach $90B by 2022.
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Build out a network
infrastructure for computing
What It’s Doing Now
Investments
Google is heavily invested in developing a network infrastructure
to handle higher levels of computing. The company has cited
that one of the main drivers of its capital expenditures is building
out compute capacity, as more complicated machine learning
capabilities increasingly require more processing power.
As Ruth Porat explained on the Q2’18 earnings call:

“We’re focused on capex as a lens into
the outlook for growth for additional
compute capacity, which has a number
of growth drivers, including supporting
growth in our search and ads business
as well as newer businesses.”
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On the network infrastructure front, Google has built out a data
center network to support its growing cloud business. The
company currently operates 15 data centers across the globe
(8 in the US, 4 in Europe, 2 in Asia, and 1 in South America) which
house its compute, storage, and data replication services.
Additionally, Google has invested heavily in a number of subsea
cable projects to support its computing capabilities. In July, the
company announced a private subsea cable project that will
cross the Atlantic Ocean. Dubbed the Durant cable, the system
will be the first private trans-Atlantic cable built by a non-telecom
company. The cable is intended to increase network capacity
across the internet and also support the growth of Google Cloud.
Where It’s Going Next
Looking ahead, it’s clear that Google aims to pioneer the most
advanced computing technology, which at the moment seems
to be quantum computing.
Quantum computing provides substantially more processing
power than a traditional computer, processing more information
and at a faster rate. As co-founder Sergey Brin outlined in the
company’s 2017 Founder’s Letter:
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“For a specialized class of problems,
quantum computers can solve them
exponentially faster. For instance, if
we are successful with our 72 qubit
prototype, it would take millions of
conventional computers to be able to
emulate it.”

As a result, Google is investing substantially in quantum
computing, and has come to be seen as one of the leaders
in the space, along with Intel and IBM.
Google’s Quantum team sits under Google AI. The team is
working on advancing quantum computing by developing
quantum processors and novel quantum algorithms.
In July, the Quantum team launched an open source software
platform called Cirq. The platform allows users to run quantum
algorithms on Google’s simulator. The below image, called
Hofstadter’s butterfly, shows how electrons would behave in
such a simulated magnetic field.
Quantum computers use qubits, which are more sophisticated
than standard digital bits that represent either 1 or 0. Qubits,
however, can be in both states at once (1 and 0) thanks to a
phenomenon known as superposition.
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Google has also developed hardware that can support quantum
computing. For example, its Bristlecone chip currently holds the
record number of “qubits.”
Ultimately, quantum computing can be used to run a wide variety
of machines more efficiently.
News
Media mentions of Google’s quantum computing efforts have
recently come to exceed mentions of Intel’s and IBM’s efforts
in the space.
Earnings transcripts
On Google’s company earnings calls, quantum computing has
yet to enter the conversation. That said, senior management
prioritizes computing hardware, namely Google’s tensor
processing unit (the TPU), which has been built specifically for
machine learning and tailored for TensorFlow, its open source
machine learning software platform. In February 2018, the
company announced that it was making TPUs available in beta on
the Google Cloud Platform.
According to Google, the TPU is faster and substantially
more energy efficient than contemporary processing chips
such as CPUs (central processing units) and GPUs (graphic
processing units).
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Why Is This A Priority?
As Google increases its capabilities in machine learning and
cloud, it will need to build out the infrastructure to support it,
such as fiber-optic cables. According to the company’s SVP for
technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, Google needs to double its
transmission capacity each year to maintain its core businesses.
Fiber-optic cables have traditionally carried telephone traffic, but
lately, content and cloud computing flows are dominating traffic
flow, making up 77% of data traffic across the Atlantic Ocean
and 60% across the Pacific Ocean in 2017. As a result, Google is
investing in submarine fiber-optic cables (as mentioned above),
most notably to connect to areas with growing internet usage,
such as China.
In addition to network infrastructure, the company also must build
out the computing capabilities of its own hardware so that it can
own the computing stack from end-to-end.
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Protect advertising
business from rising
competition in digital —
especially from Amazon
What It’s Doing Now
With Amazon’s recent rise to the top of e-commerce, Google has
lost a substantial amount of its product advertising volume, which
makes up roughly 60% of the company’s ad clicks. Additionally,
both Amazon and Apple have spent billions on content and music
services to make their media/app platforms stickier, posing
a direct threat to Google’s ability to dominate its advertising
business across platforms.
Now, Google is fighting back, making a notable push in the digital
commerce and content arena. The company’s efforts here reflect
its attempts to take back its leadership in product search and
prevent share loss in other advertising channels.
Product launches
One examples of Google’s recent attempts to reclaim its territory
in product search includes its March 2018 launch of Shopping
Actions, a tool that integrates the retail experience across
Google’s platforms (including mobile, desktop, and voice-powered
devices). Early tests suggest that the project is increasing online
shopping cart sizes by as much as 30%.
In 2017, Google partnered with a number of major retailers,
including Walmart, Target, and Costco, to bolster its delivery
platform, Google Express. The platform allows users to
shop across a number of retailers with free delivery over a
certain threshold.
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Google has also launched several services in the content space
to make its broader platform stickier. Through its Google Play
platform, users can access the Android app store, as well as
music, magazines, books, movies, and television programs —
competing with Amazon’s multitude of Prime services aimed at
content consumption and Apple’s suite of content offerings.
Google has seen substantial growth in its YouTube business,
through which it has started to offer paid channel memberships.
It can also tap into revenue from merchandise shelves on
YouTube channels and other endorsement opportunities.
Parallel to its efforts to build out content delivery, Google has
launched a number of initiatives related to improving internet
connectivity (as discussed above).
Google Fiber was the company’s initial foray into providing
broadband internet to the masses. The project offered faster
internet access to businesses and residents of a few select cities
throughout the US. However, given how capital intensive it was to
scale its fiber-optic infrastructure, the company eventually stalled
plans to expand.
While Google’s telecom division, known as Alphabet Access, has
struggled to scale and gain market share from major incumbents
like AT&T and Comcast, Google’s attempts to disrupt the network
connectivity space have spurred innovation from incumbents,
which has allowed Google to broaden content delivery capabilities
and reach.
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Where It’s Going Next
Earnings transcripts
Capturing digital commerce is critical to Google’s strategy moving
forward, as it allows the company to recapture a portion of the
product searches it has lost to Amazon while also providing
another valuable avenue for collecting consumer data.
In Q4’17, CEO Pichai spoke to the importance of building out
Google’s presence in digital commerce:

“E-commerce is evolving a lot and
we continue to invest there. Google
shopping is doing well. And we work
hard to make sure we bring the best
experience possible, which is why we
partner with companies like Walmart
for example to make it easier to buy
products. Consumer behavior is
changing but we are comfortable
given the breadth of how we do
things and how we are focused on
user experience there.”

Digital commerce is also inherently tied to Google’s cloud
business. The more retailers that Google partners with on the
digital commerce front, the more opportunity it has to extend
its expertise in enterprise cloud services. Pichai touched on
this in the Q2’18 call:
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“On the commerce front, obviously, it’s
a natural sector I think for us to drive
partnerships. We already have deep
advertising relationships with many of
these providers, increasingly. Shopping
is an area where we are beginning to
work together. And finally, I think cloud is
another important way by which we can
start working together.”

In its attempts to become a content provider, Google has
prioritized YouTube — mentions of YouTube now outpace
those of Google’s largest business, Google Search, on
company earnings calls.
In addition to new streams of ad and subscription revenue,
innovation in content also stand to benefit Google’s cloud
business, as faster streaming capacity and reduced latency
will require higher levels of computing power. Notably, music
streaming service Spotify and video streaming service Netflix
have moved away from AWS and Azure in favor of Google
Cloud Platform (GCP) services.
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Why This Initiative?

When it comes to digital commerce, Google’s main objective
is to protect its advertising business from all angles. Product
search is a critical component of Google’s business, and the
company cannot afford to lose more of that business to
e-commerce giant Amazon.
On the content side, Google’s ability to engage with consumers
in gaming and media streaming could present another avenue to
deploy its advertising business, as well as an additional source of
data collection to improve its search and advertising capabilities.
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Expand in India &
Southeast Asia, rebuild
presence in China
A number of Google’s recent investments, partnerships, and
internal projects suggest an interest in building out a presence
in India and Southeast Asia, two regions that are experiencing
outsized growth in internet usage.
Google’s recent activity also suggests that China is on its
radar, despite historical tension between the tech giant and
the Chinese government.
These emerging economies offer incremental revenue streams
as connectivity improves and more and more consumers gain
access to the internet.

What It’s Doing Now
Google has ramped up its investment in emerging markets in
recent quarters, namely in India and Indonesia — two countries
seeing explosive growth in digital commerce.
Building up its e-commerce presence allows Google to capitalize
on the growth in these regions while also maintaining its foothold
in search and advertising.
Investments
In January, Google participated in in a $1.5B tranche of Series
C funding to Indonesian ride-hailing giant GO-JEK. Similar to
Uber, GO-JEK also offers food delivery services and a mobile
payments platform.
The GO-JEK investment was Google’s first investment in
Indonesia. The deal came less than a month after Google
made its first investment in India, contributing to personal
concierge and delivery service platform Dunzo’s $12M Series
B round in December.
In addition to India and Southeast Asia, Google has set its eyes
on China, despite historical setbacks in the country.
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While many view China as a missed opportunity for Google, the
company has stepped up its investments in the region. Recent
investments include a $550M investment in JD.com, China’s
second-largest e-commerce platform, and a $76M investment
in China-based gaming firm Chushou.
Google’s return-focused investment arm capitalG has also made
a number of investments to companies based in India and China.
According to Kaushik Anand, the head of capitalG’s operations
in India, capitalG looks to back “sustainable business models
operating in large markets.” India serves as a substantial
opportunity on that front, given that the country has the
second largest internet market in the world after China,
with over 450M users.
CapitalG’s recent deals abroad include investments in India-based
fintech company Aye Finance’s $21.5M Series C in June – the
fund’s first fintech investment in India – as well as in Chinese
truck-hailing platform Manbang Group’s $1.9B round in April.
Google has also dedicated internal resources to connecting
remote parts of the globe. Loon, Google’s moonshot project for
remote telecommunication projects, recently graduated from X
to became its own company under the Alphabet umbrella. Loon
can launch balloons 12+ miles into the stratosphere to provide
cellular coverage in remote areas or areas affected by natural
disasters. In July, Loon announced that it will launch its first
commercial service in Kenya next year, offering 4G coverage via
its high-altitude balloons.
Product launches
Google launched mobile payments platform Tez in India in
September 2017. Tez is a free mobile wallet that allows users to
make payments directly from their bank account. Through Tez,
Google is ultimately attempting to become an integral part of
commerce in India, which offers a huge opportunity for growth.
Where It’s Going Next
Google has only just begun its foray into India & Southeast Asia
and its re-entry into China, but expansion in these markets seems
to be crucial to its strategy moving forward.
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News
Google’s partnership with JD.com will likely give it an opening to
re-establish itself in China, given that JD is the second-largest
e-commerce player in China (after Alibaba) and has a notable
hold on the consumer space in the country.
More broadly, the JD.com partnership could offer Google the
opportunity to strengthen its hold on product searches and
voice-driven e-commerce, even as competitors such as Amazon
chip away at its foothold.
Google has also made headlines in recent weeks amid rumors
that it has been tracking search queries to develop a censored
search engine in China. Google has historically had tense relation-
ships with governments and consumers in China, withdrawing
its desktop search engine from the country roughly 8 years ago
following a phishing scandal.
Despite these tensions, China presents a unique opportunity for
the firm: the company’s internet market has grown substantially
since Google pulled its search platform, and the majority of its
770M+ internet users are accessing the web through Google’s
Android operating system.
Google is also looking to take advantage of China’s growing
cloud market and is seeking to offer its cloud services out of data
centers run by local companies, according to recent reports.
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Earnings transcripts
India and Indonesia came into focus on the company’s Q2’18
earnings call, given the company’s recent investments.
CEO Pichai outlined the importance of these regions in more
detail on the call:
“I want to highlight the work that we’re
doing to build great specialized products
for the next wave of people coming
online for the first time in countries
like India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria,
many of whom experience the web only
through their mobile phone. This is a big
area of focus for us.”

Why Is This A Priority?
As internet access improves globally, a number of emerging
markets are seeing outsized growth in internet usage and
growing demand for connected devices. Southeast Asia, for
example, reportedly has rising internet adoption across more than
600M consumers.
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This presents a substantial opportunity for Google’s expansion.
CEO Pichai has cited emerging markets as a notable avenue for
growth:

“The user growth there is extraordinary.
And we are seeing it across all our
products, which have over a billion
users each and we are all doing well
in these markets.”

Market sizings
The revenue opportunity in these spaces is substantial. According
to consensus analyst estimates, the e-commerce markets in India
and Southeast Asia are expected to reach roughly $200B and
$88B by 2025, respectively.
Alongside growth in digital commerce is an opportunity in
payments. In India, the payments industry is expected to
reach $1T by 2025, and in Southeast Asia, analysts estimate
the market could reach $200B. Establishing a presence in these
more nascent markets could pay off for Google, and capturing
even just a segment of these markets could serve as a notable
revenue opportunity.
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Disrupt the transportation
and logistics industry
Alphabet has placed a number of strategic bets in the
transportation space across its investment arms, and its
several ongoing internal projects suggest the company is
seeking to capitalize on the future of transportation.

What It’s Doing Now
Investments
Google has ramped up its mobility investments in recent months,
with both GV and Alphabet investing in scooter company Lime’s
$335M Series C in July. As mentioned above, Google participated
in a $1.5B Series C follow-on tranche for Indonesian ride-hailing
company GO-JEK, the largest deal it has participated in to date
in 2018 (8/15/18).
Alphabet’s other investment arms, GV and capitalG, have invested
in ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft, respectively.
Product launches
Google has a number of transportation-related projects running
in-house. Autonomous driving remains a critical part of Google’s
Other Bets, as Alphabet’s self-driving arm Waymo continues to
gain traction.
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Waymo is widely recognized as the industry leader in autonomous
driving technology. The company has logged an unprecedented
number of miles driven (a closely watched metric in the
self-driving technology space). Presumably, the more driver data
a car’s software has to process, the more informed the car will be
and the fewer mistakes it will make on the road.
At Google’s I/O conference this past January, Waymo CEO John
Krafcik announced that the company had reached 7 billion
simulated miles driven, an industry high. In July, Waymo reported
that it had reached 8 million miles driven on public roads, and that
the company has reached a rate of 25,000 miles a day.
Waymo is the first AV company to launch a commercial fleet
of autonomous vehicles. The company plans to operate a
self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona by the end of this
year, leveraging a partnership with Fiat Chrysler. Waymo has
also partnered with Jaguar Land Rover to add up to 20,000
autonomous I-Paces to its fleet by 2020.
Waymo has taken an in-house approach to developing its
autonomous vehicle technology, building out its own software
and sensors to limit dependency on outside suppliers. On the
computing side, Waymo has leveraged Google’s TensorFlow
and tensor processing units (TPUs) to train its neural networks.
Waymo claims that developing its technology internally allows
for more efficiency and tighter integration.
Outside of ride-hailing, Waymo is also looking to leverage
its strength in self-driving technology for freight delivery,
which ties into Google’s larger ambitions for disrupting
the logistics space. In March, Waymo said that it will start
deploying semi-autonomous trucks to deliver freight to its data
centers in Atlanta, and Waymo CEO Krafcik has expressed
interest in pursuing public transportation projects.
Beyond these initiatives, Alphabet’s ambitions also span urban
development, with its Sidewalk Labs unit leveraging technology
to tackle urban challenges from transportation to sustainability
to cost of living.
Google’s drone delivery company, Project Wing, recently
graduated from Google X to become an independent company
under the Alphabet umbrella. The company has performed some
of the first drone deliveries in Australia, and its graduation from X
suggests that it may soon be ready to introduce its technology to
the world on a commercial scale.
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Patents
In addition to these transportation efforts, Google is also looking
to double down on logistics. Looking at IP activity related to
delivery methods, Google is closing the gap with Amazon, which
has established a notable lead in logistics.
This uptick in activity suggests that in addition to the number of
partnerships Google has announced on the logistics front, the
company is also working on efforts to innovate in-house.
Where It’s Going Next
Earnings transcripts
Waymo has been a popular topic on Google’s earnings calls.
Mentions of “Waymo” and “autonomous driving” reached a new
peak in Q4’17 and have maintained an elevated level since then,
suggesting that the project will continue to be a priority.
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Why Is This A Priority?

Both the transportation and the logistics industries are ripe
for disruption.
In transportation, the rise of shared mobility services and the
prospect for autonomous vehicles have allowed non-traditional
players like tech companies to establish a notable presence in the
space. Shared mobility has seen explosive growth in recent years,
and Alphabet’s investments across its funds in Uber, Lyft, and
most recently Lime suggest it’s interested in capitalizing on the
next generation of mobility services.
In logistics, Google is likely investing heavily to defend itself
against drone delivery and other logistics initiatives by Amazon,
which is well ahead of Google in e-commerce and threatens to
capture share away from Google’s main line of business, search
and advertising.
Market sizings
Shared mobility still has potential, especially on a global basis:
analysts estimate the market for shared mobility will reach
$2.6T by 2030.
Additionally, Google leads the pack in autonomous driving. If it
can establish itself as a major player in the space, it could reap
the benefits of the industry’s estimated value of $70B by 2030.
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Push healthcare forward
through data and AI
As we highlighted in our Google in healthcare report, Google
has attacked the inefficient healthcare industry from a number
of angles.
What It’s Doing Now
Disease detection is an crucial part of healthcare. Alphabet’s life
sciences subsidiary Verily has partnered with a number of other
technology and pharmaceutical companies to develop tools to
improve disease detection.
In December 2016, Verily partnered with Nikon subsidiary Optos
to tackle diabetic retinopathy, a condition where high sugar levels
cause damage to blood vessels in the eye.
Investments
GV has shown a notable interest in the healthcare sector.
GV founder Bill Maris inspired the investment arm’s focus on
healthcare, which now makes up roughly a third of GV’s deals
(up from just 6% in 2013).
In recent months, the VC arm has taken an interest in AI
applications in medicine, participating in Viz.ai’s $21M round
in July and investing $5M in a Series A follow-on to Owkin in May.
Viz.ai uses AI to detect early signs of medical conditions, while
Owkin’s platform uses deep learning to help clinical researchers
develop drugs and predictive models.
GV is also interested in pureplay healthcare, investing in
healthcare providers (One Medical), genomics (Editas, Foundation
Medicine, 23andMe), and biotechnology (Celsius Therapeutics,
IDEAYA Biosciences), and digital health (Oscar Health, Quartet
Health). In August 2018, Alphabet made a $375M investment
into small health insurer Oscar and announced that longtime
Google executive and former YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar
would join the board.
Google subsidiary Verily makes its own investments, most
notably a $500M joint venture focused on diabetes management
with pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. The joint venture, called Onduo,
is working on an “all-in-one” insulin patch pump that’s prefilled
and connected to the internet.
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Product launches
Google is leveraging its capabilities in AI to drive efficiencies
in healthcare data management. The company’s AI-focused
subsidiary, DeepMind, has developed an app called “Streams”
that helps detect kidney injuries from lab results so that doctors
and nurses can be alerted immediately via a mobile app. The
technology helps escalate more urgent cases.
Google is using AI both for disease detection and for new data
infrastructure. DeepMind is working on a data infrastructure plan
that could be sold to other companies.
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Where It’s Going Next
As mentioned before, Alphabet views healthcare as a strategic
priority moving forward, most notably through new applications
of AI and machine learning technology.
Earnings transcripts
Even though healthcare has been part of Google’s strategy for
years, the company has grown increasingly focused on the
space, with mentions of “healthcare” and Alphabet’s healthcare
subsidiaries reaching a new peak in Q2’18.
Google’s approach in healthcare moving forward is a pragmatic
one. The company has chosen to work with existing incumbents
in the healthcare system and is looking to new applications for its
AI technology.
Additionally, Alphabet sees an opportunity for its cloud business,
building out its own healthcare-specific cloud services to
differentiate itself. Historically, because the healthcare industry
is so highly regulated, it has been an arduous process to digitize
health records and store them on the cloud.
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CEO Pichai highlighted the opportunity in cloud on the Q2’18
earnings call:

“Across healthcare, we see a big oppor-
tunity for both Google and Alphabet. It’s
a vertical that’s very important for Cloud.
And we are obviously helping a lot of
healthcare partners across their needs.”

He went on to hint that there would be much more to say about
cloud’s role in healthcare in the months to come.
There’s also an opportunity on the hardware end. Apple is
currently developing technology for the iPhone that can screen
for disease. Google could do the same with Pixel or even the
Google Home, from at-home health assessments to wearables
that can be used for diagnostics.
Google is also looking to utilize its data management abilities in
the R&D space, most recently in clinical trials. Project Baseline, a
new initiative that Google launched to utilize patient-generated
data to eliminate the need for a control group in drug trials,
stands to reduce recruiting bottlenecks and make the overall
clinical trial process more efficient.
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Why Is This A Priority?

The inefficiencies in the healthcare system present an opportunity
for Google to implement its expertise in AI to tackle diseases.
There are a number of areas across healthcare that Google
could tap into to access new streams of revenue. For example,
Google could serve as an R&D engine for large medical device
and pharma companies. Additionally, it could develop its own
digital health services, which it could integrate into its already
established suite of connected hardware devices. Services like
diabetes coaching could stand to gain from AI, and in turn be sold
to employers or insurance companies.
Market sizing
Google could potentially amass new cloud customers by getting
further involved in the healthcare space. The healthcare system
works with massive amounts of data and computing power,
serving up an opportunity for Google to market its Google Cloud
services. Analysts estimate that the healthcare cloud computing
market could reach $15B by 2022.
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Conclusion
Google’s efforts to defend its moat in the search and advertising
space span a variety of initiatives. The company is tackling the
consumer and enterprise experiences from multiple angles,
many of which have already shown themselves to be proven
areas of growth.
Alphabet’s restructuring and a pragmatic investing philosophy
instilled by Ruth Porat have helped the company more efficiently
deploy its capital to more lucrative opportunities. In addition to
developing new technologies, its focus on tackling the outsized
growth in emerging markets is also promising.
On the whole, Google is taking a comprehensive approach —
though what will matter in the future is whether its capabilities
across businesses and its developments in machine learning
are enough to differentiate it from its rising competition.