Google Inc (GOOG)
Q42012 Earnings Call
January 22, 2013 4:30 pm ET
Executives
Willa Chalmers - Senior Manager of Investor Relations
Larry Page - Chief Executive Officer, Director
Patrick Pichette - Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President
Nikesh Arora - Senior Vice President, Chief Business Officer
Analysts
Carlos Kirjner - Bernstein
Ben Schachter - Macquarie
Scott Devitt - Morgan Stanley
Mark Mahaney - RBC Capital Markets
Anthony Diclemente - Barclays
Justin Post - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Stephen Ju - Credit Suisse
Ross Sandler - Deutsche Bank Securities
Richard Kramer - Arete Research
Neil Doshi - Citi
Heather Bellini - Goldman Sachs
Douglas Anmuth - JPMorgan
Presentation
Operator
Good day and welcome everyone to the Google Inc. fourth quarter 2012 earnings conference call. This call is being recorded.
At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Willa Chalmers, Senior Manager of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Willa Chalmers
Great, thank you, Jennifer. Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to today's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2012 earnings conference call. With us are Larry Page, Chief Executive Officer; Patrick Pichette, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer.
Also, as you know, we distribute our earnings release through our Investor Relations website located at investor.google.com. So, please refer to our IR website for our earnings releases, as well as the supplementary slides that accompany the call. You can also visit our Google Plus Investor Relations page for the latest company news and updates. So, please check it out. This call is also being webcast from investor.google.com. A replay of the call will be available on our website later today.
So, let me quickly cover the Safe Harbor. Some of the statements that we make today may be considered forward-looking, including statements regarding Google's future investments, our long-term growth and innovation, the expected performance of our businesses and our expected level of capital expenditures.
These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.
Please refer to our SEC filings for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. Please note that certain financial measures that we use on this call, such as operating income and operating margin, are also expressed on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude charges related to stock-based compensation.
We have also adjusted our net cash provided by operating activities to remove capital expenditures, which we refer to as free cash flow. Our GAAP results and reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release.
With that, I will turn the call over to Larry.
Larry Page
Happy New Year everyone and welcome to our earnings call. Thank you for joining us this afternoon. We ended 2012 with a strong quarter. Revenue was up 36% year-on-year and 8% quarter-on-quarter and we hit $50 billion in revenue for the first time last year, not a bad achievement in just a decade-and-a-half.
We have talked a lot about excellence and velocity over the last year. While many claim it's my nature never to be satisfied, we've actually made real progress creating more beautiful and more intuitive products.
Take Search. The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you want. Our Knowledge Graph brings that much closer.
Search for Nikola Tesla and you will get information about this great inventor that is beautifully displayed right from the results page. His basic bio, books he wrote, his photo, no extra work needed, and we even recommend information about other inventors such as Edison and Marconi that you can easily browse through. Again, right from the results page.
And last quarter, we launched the Knowledge Graph in seven new languages, including Spanish, Japanese and Russian. This is hard work. It's about way more than translating the words on the page. Google has to understand millions of different entities as well as their meaning and context.
I'm also excited about the progress we’ve made with Voice Search. You're in your car, sadly it's still a car you have to drive and it’s not electric and you're running out of gas. Just pick up your phone and ask Google for directions to the nearest gas station and you'll be on your way immediately. It's a great example of how we can take the hassle right out of your life.
Our long-term investments in Google Maps have really paid off. The team has worked tremendously hard to create the most accurate and comprehensive maps in the world. Driving country-by-country may have seemed crazy a few years back. Today, it’s totally obvious, because location is core to your search experience. And with Google Maps for iOS, we have reinvigorated our product. It's more intuitive and beautiful, and users love it. Google Maps for iOS was downloaded over 10 million times in the first 48 hours!
In fact, six Google apps were included in Apple's App Store Best Free Apps of 2012, including YouTube, Chrome, Google Search and Gmail.
I’ve always believed that computers should do the hard work, so you can get on with the things that matter in life living, learning and loving. So it’s exciting to see our progress with Google Now. Launched earlier in the year, it gives you information before you even have to ask. We’ll now proactively provide your flight times, or your boarding pass, or directions to your next appointment. We'll even suggest interesting places to visit nearby.
As I discussed on the last earnings call, we now live in a multi-screen world. People carry a supercomputer in their pocket all the time. In fact, we feel naked without our smartphone and many users have more than one device, a laptop, a phone, and a tablet. We are living in unchartered territory. It's a new kind of computing environment. Everyone is really excited about the technology and are spending a lot of money on devices driving faster adoption than we have ever seen before.
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