The earnings announcement from the search engine company brought a warm feeling to investors as the stock soared in after-hours trading to $335.75.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin commented on the company, with a backdrop of a strong third quarter and a sevenfold increase in profits. Revenues also virtually doubled for Google during the period.
Though Google had been cautious in suggesting the third quarter numbers would be affected by “summertime seasonality,” their efforts to bring in bigger customers seems to be succeeding. Schmidt said during the conference call that “we’re attracting a lot more business from Fortune 500 companies.”
“But we believe that search networks as industries remain in their nascent stages of growth with great forward potential,” Schmidt said; as per custom, though, Google does not provide forward guidance, so how much potential Google perceives isn’t known.
Page, founder and president of products, listed the products Google released and refined during the period: Google Talk, Desktop 2, Blog Search, Video, and Blogger. He repeated Google’s view of its San Francisco Wi-Fi proposal as “an opportunity to make San Francisco a test ground for new location-based technology.”
For those who remember the whole ‘index size’ issue, Page did note that Google is “about 1000 times larger than the index we had when we started. That makes Google three times larger than any other search engine, by our estimates.”
Brin, founder and president of technology, touched on some international moves by Google. The company opened sales offices in Stockholm, and plans to open others in Tel Aviv and Poland. He also noted a number of announcements related to China, and did mention Kai-Fu Lee beginning work at their new R&D center in the country.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
