In a surprise organizational shake up, Google has announced that Sundar Pichai, top executive at Google, will be taking over as CEO of Google. Google will now be a subsidiary of Alphabet, a new parent company overseeing all the Google products. Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be the CEO and President respectively of new subsidiary. Sundar will have direct responsibility of all the core Google products such as Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android etc. Add on businesses such as Nest will be spun into a different business unit under Alphabet.
“Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable,” wrote Page in a letter to SEC on Monday. “Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet (http://abc.xyz). I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.”
SundarĀ “has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company,” Page said. “I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as him to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that.”
Alphabet Inc. will 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. Two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG.
Sundar Pichai is the latest from Indian community to take over as CEO at a tech major after Satya Nadella took over the reigns at Microsoft.
