Company Overview
Rated by Fortune Magazine as the number one company to work for, five years running, Google Inc. is a global technology company. Mainly focused around areas such as searching information, advertising, operating systems and computer products, google generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising (Fortune, 2014). Providing businesses and individuals a variety of tools to help on and off the web find the information they seek. Their goal is to make search smarter and faster, generating most of their revenue primarily by delivering online advertising. They also generate revenues by selling hardware products from companies such as Motorola. Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their cooperation in 1998 after Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim fronted them $100,000 (Google.com, 2014).
Google comes from the word “googol” a mathematical term for a value followed by 100 zero’s. Offering targeted search results, called PageRank, targeting search results from billions of Web pages. Revenue is generated through ad sales. Advertisers deliver relevant ads targeted to and audience based on their search quarries (Hoover’s Inc., 2014). Looking at the financing, investing and operating activities of google shows there are some ups and down over the life of this relatively young company but over all a strong financial position. Google has done well over all averaging real growth rate annually almost consecutively. They have had some problems with operating expenses, took a steeper climb then before. Income and cash flow grew as well until 2011 when the operating expenses shot upward then settled down again (Google.com, 2014).
Looking into the reason for the high spike in operating cost it seems they have hurt themselves where income should have continued its upward climb it has stalled. The company seems to invest disproportionate amounts of money into “other assets” and it does not show whether or not these other