The year 2014 is halfway through and the world’s largest search engine company has tripled its spending on acquisitions during this time. The total acquisition expenditure of Google Inc. amounted to a whopping $4.2 billion and was made by the internet company for ramping up investments that would aid in expanding the services that it offers. $3.2 billion of the total were spent by the largest online advertiser of the world on the acquisition of Nest Labs, a thermostat firm in February of 2014. This was the major purchase and the other $1 billion had also been spent by the company on other purchases in the first half of 2014.
This information was obtained from the filing made by the California based web company. A previous filing showed that only a year ago, the acquisition spending of the firm had been about $1.3 billion, but has seen a substantial increase since then. However, the numbers for this year don’t include the $1 billion that the company said it would use in order to pay for DropCam, a home-camera company and Skybox Imaging, a satellite service. The reason is that these acquisitions of the company will not be closed in the first half of 2014.
The scale of deal spending of the company is noticing a significant boost because Google is working to support its core businesses of search-advertising and also for extending its reach into other new and profitable markets such as driverless cars, telecommunications and mobile. The smaller acquisitions that were made by the company this year covered everything from video advertising to drones. In its recent filing, the search engine giant said that the acquisitions are extremely helpful in enhancing the depth and breadth of expertise of the company in various functional areas including engineering, product offerings and technologies.
The company also added that an antitrust investigation that was being conducted by the Texas Attorney General’s office into Google’s business practices had also drawn to a close. It was in July 2010 that an investigation had been initiated by the attorney general’s office to judge if the firm was thwarting its competitors. Information had been sought by the state from the company, which included the formula used by the search engine for calculating advertising rates. The end of the investigation comes after a similar probe into the company’s practices was dropped by the US Federal Trade Commission last year.
In February, Joaquin Almunia, the Antitrust commissioner of the European Union also made a deal with the company for resolving an argument over how the firm uses its leadership in the market for dealing with the competition. Under the deal, Google had agreed that it would display results advertising and promoting the services of rivals in its search engine results. Since then, plenty of criticism has been directed at the agreement between the European Union and Google. No comment was made by a spokesman of Google Inc. regarding the end of the antitrust investigation by the Texas Attorney General’s office.