Google Inc. (GOOG)
Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript
January 22, 2009 4:30 p.m. ET

Executives

Krista Bessinger - Director of Investor Relations
Eric Schmidt - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Patrick Pichette – Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Jonathan Rosenberg – Senior Vice President, Product Management
Omid Kordestani – Senior Vice President of Global Sales & Business Development

Analysts

Ben Schachter - UBS
Imran Khan - JPMorgan
Justin Post - Merrill Lynch
Spencer Wang - Credit Suisse
Mark Mahaney - Citigroup
James Mitchell - Goldman Sachs
Doug Anmuth - Barclays Capital
Christa Quarles - Thomas Weisel Partners
Heath Terry - FBR Capital Markets

Presentation

Operator

Please stand by, we are about to begin. Good day and welcome everyone to the Google Inc. conference call. This call is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Krista Bessinger, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma''am.

Krista Bessinger

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today''s fourth quarter 2008 earnings conference call.

With us are Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer joining from New York; Patrick Pichette, Chief Financial Officer; and Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Products Management, both joining from Mountain View; and Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Operations is joining from London. Eric, Patrick and Jonathan will provide us with the results on the quarter, and then Omid will join us for Q&A.

Please note that this call is being webcast from our Investor Relations website located at investor.google.com. Please refer to our website for important information, including our earnings press release issued a few minutes ago, along with slides that accompany today''s prepared remarks. A replay of this call will also be available on our website in a few hours. Please note that we routinely post important information on our Investor Relations website, located at investor.google.com, and we encourage you to make use of that resource.

In addition, please note that we''re moving to a two-call structure this quarter. First, we will host our traditional strategic overview and Q&A with the usual format, followed by a second call which is effectively an extended Q&A session giving the opportunity for participants to ask more detailed financial and products questions in an efficient and regulatory compliant manner. The second call will begin at 3 P.M. Pacific and will also be webcast from our Investor Relations website.

Now, let me quickly cover the Safe Harbor. Some of the statements we make today may be considered forward-looking, including statements regarding investments in our core business, expected performance of aspects of our business, profit acquisition costs, operational efficiency in costs, our expected level of capital expenditures, and our proposed option exchange program, including the expected resulting modification charge. 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 provide or publicly release the results of any revisions of these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, for the quarter ended September 30, 2008 as well as our earning press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. Copies can be obtained from the SEC or by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website.

Also, please note that certain financial measures we use on this call, such as EPS, net income, operating margins, operating income and our effective tax rate, are expressed on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude charges related to stock-based compensation. We''ve also adjusted our net cash providing by operating activities to remove capital expenditures, which we refer to as free cash flow. Our GAAP results and GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations can be found in our earnings press release.

With that, it''s my pleasure to turn the call over to Eric.

Eric Schmidt

Thank you very much, Krista, and good afternoon to everybody on the call. As she mentioned, we''re making a couple of changes here. In particular, Patrick and I are going to be taking the lead on these calls, and Larry and Sergey will occasionally attend. They continue to focus on technology and product innovation which, of course, they do so very, very well.

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