Google Case Analysis

GoogleA.PositioningShort company historyGoogle Inc. was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were attending Stanford University in 1998. The idea of this was a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, like ranking results according to the most number of times the search term appeared on a site. Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998.
Google’s first funding source was from a Sun Microsystems co-founder, Andy Bechtolsheim, who helped contribute $100,000 in 1998. In 1999, the next group of investors were Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, who invested a total of $25 million into the company. The Google IPO took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 USD per share.
Vision and Mission StatementGoogle’s mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google believes that the most effective, and ultimately the most profitable, way to accomplish that mission is to put the needs of its users first. Google has found that offering a high-quality user experience leads to increased traffic and strong word-of-mouth promotion. Their dedication to putting users first is reflected in three key commitments:•We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful search results possible, independent of financial incentives. Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them.
•We will do our best to provide the most relevant and useful advertising. Advertisements should not be an annoying interruption. If any element on a search result page is influenced by payment to us, we will make it clear to our users.
•We will never stop working to improve our user experience, our search technology and other important areas of information organization.
CustomersProducts or ServicesMarketsTechnologyConcern for survival, growth and profitabilityPhilosophySelf-ConceptPublic ImageEmployeesObjectivesGoogle’s objectives are partly named in its mission statement. Their goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible to anyone. According to Google’s Annual 10-K Report, they serve their users by developing products that let them more quickly and easily find, create, organize and share information. They place a premium on products that matter to many people and have the potential to improve their lives.
Google offers a wide array of products and services. The most obvious and well know is their search engine named Google. The Google search uses PageRank, Algortihms, Link Measurement, and Profiling as part of its objective to deliver the most accurate and most relevant results to the searcher. Google also offers a very successful email product called Gmail. Gmail is unique in that it allows the email account holder much more free space (7GB) than the average free email client. In my experience, Gmail is an exceptional email client as it provides many more services than the standard email. It also enables its users to chat with each other through Google chat. This is something very innovative and unique only to Gmail. This also enhances the power of its objective to share and organize information more easily. You may also add labels and filters for specific information that needs to be separated and organized, this is something I find extremely useful as a consumer.
Google also offers Google Maps. Google Maps is a free web mapping service application and technology provided by Google that powers many map-based services including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit and embedded maps on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a route planner for traveling by foot, bicycle, car, or public transport and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. It also can help with finding businesses. Google Maps is another successful application in that it is not just an average web mapping system. This advanced mapping system offers satellite imagery of most urban cities in the US and around the world. It also can be integrated with many mobile phones, which allows for a GPS mapping system directly on the phone. These features allow its users to find information and easily share it to anyone in the world.
Google offers so many products and applications that I cannot discuss them all in detail, but the vast majority of these applications helps Google in reaching its objective to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible.
StrategiesWith the amount of traffic Google receives on a daily basis, Google has to have some kind of strategy to generate its revenue. One of Google’s main sources of revenue is advertising. In 2007, advertising accounted for 99% of Google’s revenues. Google implements two main advertising products which are AdSense and AdWords.
AdSense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and more recently, video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google uses its internet search technology to serve advertisements based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the advertisements are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the advertisements is often relevant to the website.
AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue ($16.4 billion in 2007). AdWords offers pay-per-click advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution.
Google competes to attract and retain relationships with users, advertisers and Google Network members and other content providers in different strategies:• Users. Google competes to attract and retain users of its search and communication products and services. Most of the products and services thet offer to users are free, so they do not compete on price. Instead, they compete in this area on the basis of the relevance and usefulness of their search results and the features, availability and ease of use of their products and services.
• Advertisers. Google competes to attract and retain advertisers. They compete in this area principally on the basis of the return on investment realized by advertisers using their AdWords and AdSense programs. They also compete based on the quality of customer service, features and ease of use of our products and services.
• Google Network members and other content providers. Google competes to attract and retain content providers primarily based on the size and quality of their advertiser base, their ability to help these partners generate revenues from advertising and the terms of the agreements.
With these strategies in place, Google can effectively reach their objective of organizing the world’s information and having it easily accessible universally.
Porter’s Five Forces1)Bargaining Power of Suppliers:•Google is regionally not globally dominant.
•Competition Elimination and Substitution: Microsoft embedding their search tool into their Explorer browser.
•Threat of forward integration – Google search may not perform as well with new software releases from Microsoft and Apple.
2) Potential Entry of New Competitor:•Yahoo & Microsoft have radically improved their search engines and can on pass/deploy their search tool through their products.
•There is no such thing as the perfect search engine – thus a better search engine invented by another will critically affect Google•Online marketing and the rules governing what is good and bad practices (e.g. cloaking) are still evolving, this could affect Google’s current technology and philosophy.
•Switching costs are mostly related to hardware (storage of indices and speed of information return) and accuracy related (webbots/crawlers)•Search tools are easily scalable.
•While there is currently not a great degree of ‘legislative interference’ this will most likely change.
3)Rivalry Among Competing Firms:•Rules/ethic has not been defined so the environment is easily exploited or manipulated.
•Currently there are only a few rivals (Microsoft, Yahoo) so the degree of rivalry is more oriented to an oligarchy – this could bring attention of UN or individual countries as a restriction of trade in the future.
•Switching costs for most of the search tools are nothing.
•Brand identity is important (if not paramount – Google has made the word as a noun and a verb)•Rival search tools are not dissimilar to Google’s tool.
•Search tools are also used without overt referencing (which impinges on their discoverability) – eBay’s search tool is Google.
•Improving on the search engine and its features is a significant task for a large number of highly skilled IT technologists.
4)Threat of Substitutes:•High. Switching costs are negligible•Buyer inclination to substitute is primarily driven by speed and accuracy of the result and also by the overt pushing of ads that are included with the search results and pages.
•Users of the search tool are demanding more services and complexity or sophistication with the search tool to remain ‘loyal’ to its use.
•Ad Revenue is directly related to use, even the loss of a small percentage of use can mean significant revenue loss to Google or the other search generating companies.
•Technology requires extremely skilled staff – high degree of competition for a limited pool.
•Loss of company/trade secrets if skilled staff move from one search generating organization to another.
5)Buyer Power:•Use of the search rankings is a significant leverage point by the owners of search tools in bargaining.
•Loss of ranking has in the past led to costly legal arguments – equivalent of e-defamation of character or denial of services.
•Users of the search tool are becoming more sophisticated and demanding other services also for free.
•Substitutes are available – and for the same price: free•No real reviews are undertaken on what features the web community would like to see, so each search company employs researches to straw poll/guess directions.
•Two client groups – web community wanting to search/locate items and the organizations selling products – have to satisfy both client groups equally.
•Threat of backward integration?Competitive Profile MatrixSWOTStrengths•Google – Already number one search engine has established a brand name, in which its users trust. It’s dependable, reliable and fast.
•Google needs very little end user marketing as the name itself is getting word by mouth publicity.
•Google has a simple interface and it gives comprehensive results without confusing its users.
•Google has low operation cost as it uses low cost UNIX web servers for indexing millions of web pages across internet.
•Google has hired PhDs who are continuously working hard in order to enhance search algorithms and make searching faster, efficient and relevant.
Weaknesses•Many spammers manipulate Google’s ranking technology by creating dummy sites with thousands of links to pages that they wanted Google to rank highly.
•Google’s Cost Per Click advertising charging and ranking policy is confusing and makes it difficult for marketers to predict where their ads would be positioned and how much they would cost.
•Google’s contextual advertising was perceived by marketers to be less effective in generating sales because visitors to web pages showing editorial content were less likely than searchers to be ready to buy.
•Although Google is a dominating player among search engine websites, only 50% to 65% of web search queries are answered accurately by it.
•Contextual search algorithms are not 100% perfect and many a times make mistakes.
Opportunities•Google can increase switching cost by tracking users’ search histories with their permission and could remind users through emails for the relevant search updates as per their personal interest.
•Google can become a mass-market portal like Yahoo and MSN and can increase switching cost for its users.
•Google can enhance personalized and localized searching and can also add localized paid listings of advertisers.
•Google can also merge with an established mass-market portal to lock in large number of users and advertisers.
•Google can start giving full fledged services on hand held mobile devices to capture market beyond conventional internet.
Threats•Google partially depends upon some portals like AOL. Getting those contracts terminated, Google would lose considerable share of its revenue.
•There is no long time entry barrier in this business. Many competitors can emerge in coming years with same services, better interface and names and can catch up Google’s market.
•Google’s confusing Cost Per Click ranking and charging policy could disappoint its advertisers and Google would start losing many of them.
•Google’s scale might also become a liability in order to come up with new and enhanced search techniques if company’s ability to modify its algorithms and database architecture was constrained by its server infrastructure and the size of its index.
•Google can get trapped in issues regarding privacy if it decides to go for highly personalized search for which it has to capture user’s personal information.
External Factor Evaluation (EFE)Internal Factor EvaluationFinancial AnalysisThe Price/Earnings (P/E) ratio is a company's price-per-share divided by its earnings-per-share. Google’s P/E Ratio (TTM) is 25.96 meaning it has a relatively high valuation. Although one of its competitors, Yahoo!, has a higher P/E Ratio of 44.96. Microsoft’s P/E Ratio is 9.19 indicating a low, more conservative valuation. So although Google has more market share and revenues than Yahoo, Yahoo still maintains a higher P/E Ratio than Google. However, Google’s PE Ratio is still higher than others in the industry and sector it is in.
The Price to Sales (P/S) Ratio is the stock price (total market cap) / total sales (revenues). Generally, the lower the ratio, the more attractive the investment. As easy as it sounds, price-to-sales provides a useful measure for sizing up stocks. Google’s P/S Ratio is 5 which isn’t that great. Yahoo’s P/S Ratio is 2.45 and Microsoft’s P/S Ratio is 2.46. Yahoo still remains with the better numbers in this ratio also.
Price to Book (P/B) Ratio is the stock price (total market cap) / book value. Book value consists of the accounting value of assets less (real) liabilities, sort of an accounting net worth or owner's equity of a corporation. This figure has greater meaning in financial services industries, where most assets are actual dollars, not factories, inventories, and other hard-to-value items. A higher P/B ratio implies that investors expect management to create more value from a given set of assets. Google’s P/B Ratio is 3.83, which is greater than the industry and sector. Its competitor Yahoo, has a P/B Ratio of 1.57 which is below the industry standard. And Microsoft, another one of Google’s competitors, has a P/B Ratio of 4.43 which is above the industry standard. Microsoft most likely has much more tangible assets compared with Google and Yahoo hence the inflated ratio.
The Growth Rates in terms of Sales TTM vs TTM 1 year ago for Google is 31.35. This is a healthy number in terms of growth, it means that sales has gone up 31.35% since the same time 1 year ago. The Sales TTM vs TTM 1 year ago for Yahoo is 3.43, and for Microsoft is 7.05. This means that Google has had the most growth in sales within a 1 year TTM than its other two main competitors.
Earnings per share (EPS) are the earnings returned on the initial investment amount. EPS is generally considered to be the single most important variable in determining a share's price. It is also a major component used to calculate the price-to-earnings valuation ratio. The Earnings Per Share (EPS) TTM vs TTM 1 year ago growth rate for Google is 0.13. Yahoo’s EPS TTM vs TTM 1 year ago growth rate is -39.73, and Microsoft’s EPS TTM vs TTM 1 year ago growth rate is 6.14. This shows that there was not much growth in Google’s earnings returned to investors for the year. Yahoo’s EPS indicates that the earnings were negative and that investors lost on their initial investment. Microsoft saw the best EPS growth rates with its competitors at 6.14, meaning earnings increased for the year from its initial investment.
Internal-External MatrixThe EFE total weighted score for Google is 2.45 and the IFE total weighted score is 2.75. According to the Internal-External matrix, Google lands in region V of the matrix. This outcome suggests that Google should execute hold and maintain strategies such as market penetration and product development.
SPACE MatrixThis Google SPACE matrix tells us that our company should pursue an aggressive strategy. The company has a strong competitive position within the market with rapid growth. Google needs to use its internal strengths to develop a market penetration and market development strategy. This can include product development, integration with other companies, acquisition of competitors, and so on.
Grand Strategy MatrixThe Google Grand Strategy Matrix shows that the firm is positioned in quadrant I. This means that Google should continue to focus its concentration on current markets and also on its current product development strategies. Google remains in an excellent strategic position.
Factors:1. Google has strong market development.
2. Google has strong market penetration.
3. Google has strong product development.
SWOT MatrixCitationsGoogle, Inc. (2007). 10-K Annual Report 2007. Retrieved February 20, 2009, from SEC Info database <http://secinfo.com >Google, Inc. (2009). Corporate Information – Company Overview.
Retrieved February 20, 2009, from Google Inc. < http://www.google.com/corporate/>Google, Inc. (2009). Corporate Information – Google Milestones.
Retrieved February 20, 2009, from Google Inc. http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/history.htmlGoogle, Inc. (2009). Google Inc (GOOG.O) Stock Quote Stocks Reuters.comRetrieved February 20, 2009, from Reuters.com< " target=_blank>http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GOOG.O>