Google Becomes Alphabet
Google has announced a corporate restructuring on Monday, forming an umbrella company called Alphabet and naming a new CEO to the core business of Google.
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will run Alphabet — Page as CEO and Brin as president.
The 11-year-old company announced its new operating structure in a blog post on Monday.
They also said that Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Google.
Pichai has worked at Google since 2004, most recently as product chief. Pichai has also been the most visible Google executive of late, giving the keynote at Google’s annual developers conference earlier this year.
Alphabet will operate as the parent company for a number of smaller companies, including Google. Other departments spinning off into their own sub-companies include Life Sciences, the Google X lab, Wing (drones), and Google Ventures and Google Capital.
“We are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products — the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands,” said Page in the announcement.
Alphabet will continue to trade under the GOOGL (GOOGL, Tech30) and GOOG (GOOG) ticker symbols when the change kicks in later this year.