The first quarter of Google’s fiscal 2011 marks not only the beginning of a new year for Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), but also the beginning of new leadership. As was announced during the company’s fourth quarter 2010 earnings call, Google co-founder Larry Page is now the CEO.
Page is coming into the leadership at a good time for the company he helped to create. Revenues for the first quarter were reported at $8.58 billion, for a 27 percent year-over-year increase. Net Income for the first quarter grew to $2.30 billion, an increase from the $1.96 billion reported in the first quarter of 2010. EPS came in at $7.04 per share for first quarter of 20011 share up from $6.06 per share in 2010
“I’m managing the day-to-day operations of Google as the CEO, working very closely with my team, and I’m really excited about the progress we’ve had there, I think we really hit the ground running,” Page said during Google’s earnings call. “And Eric (Schmidt), of course, is focused externally, on the government partnerships, government relations and partnership outreaches.”
Google continues to makes the majority of its revenues from Google owned sites. In the first quarter of 2011, Google-owned site revenue represented 69 percent of total revenues, coming in at $5.88 billion. Google partner site revenues, generated by way of its AdSense programs represented 28 percent of all revenues coming in a $2.43 billion.
One of the ways that Google is aiming to grow its base of users and revenues is by way of the Chrome browser and Android smartphone operating system.
“We have built from scratch the world’s most popular smartphone operating system,” Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Google said during the call. “We’ve built also from scratch the world’s fastest growing browser and in some countries like India, one in four people are now accessing the web via Chrome.”
Search remains the bread and butter of all of Google’s activities and it’s an area that Google continued to improve during the first quarter as well.
“Search is the most important thing people do online, and there’s loads of opportunities to make Search more intelligent and more personal,” Jeff Huber, Senior Vice President, Commerce and Local at Google said during the call. “Our primary focus is to always create the best user experience, so this quarter, we launched over 90 different quality improvements. Most notably, we made an important change to our ranking algorithms to promote higher-quality sites.”
Huber added that a lot more of Google’s searches are coming from mobile devices with mobile searches up more than 500 percent in the last two years.
“Android is obviously a big driver of this,” Huber said. “We’re activating over 350,000 Android devices every day. Android market is taking off too, over 3 billion apps have been installed, up 50 percent in just the last quarter.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
