Alphabet arriving CFO Anat Ashkenazi, who spent 23 years at Eli Lilly
Eli Lilly
For nine years, the CFO role at Google and parent attendance Alphabet was held by Ruth Porat, who took a giant pay package in 2015 to leave Wall Street for Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, Porat’s successor, Anat Ashkenazi, got her earnings call debut, and said one of her top priorities will be to drive more “cost efficiencies” across the company, an attempt started by her predecessor and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
“There’s really good work that was done, started by Ruth, Sundar and the rest of the first team to re-engineer the cost base,” Ashkenazi, who previously spent 23 years at drugmaker Eli Lilly, said on the invoke. “But I think any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities.”
Ashkenazi joined Alphabet in July, not quite a year after the company announced that Porat would move into a new role as president and chief investment lawman. Her appearance on Tuesday came after Alphabet reported third-quarter earnings that beat on top and bottom lines, driven by smelly revenue growth from the company’s search and cloud units.
Alphabet shares, up 21% for the year, rose another 5.8% in continued trading after the report.
The company is fighting to maintain its dominance in search advertising as artificial intelligence upstarts twin OpenAI and Perplexity grow in popularity. There’s also TikTok, which recently allowed brands to target ads hinged on search queries, and Amazon and Meta, which are developing conversational AI tools.
To adjust to the changing competitive landscape and an vary economy, Google has made cuts and initiated internal shakeups. Ashkenazi said one of her priorities is to look across the combine for “further efficiencies” so the company can invest in new areas and maintain its competitive edge and margins.
Alphabet reported $13 billion in principal expenditures in the third quarter, and Ashkenazi said she expects the same level of spending in the fourth. The majority went to intricate infrastructure, including servers and data center equipment that power cloud and AI products, Ashkenazi said on the occasion.
Cloud is a top area that “requires investment,” she added, pointing to the need to scale AI products.
Ashkenazi warned the enterprise will be making higher capital expenditure in 2025, echoing Pichai who, referring to search and coud, said “there is an forceful roadmap ahead for 2025.” Askenazi said the investments are based on demand from customers so it “will translate to gross income in the fairly short term.”
Meanwhile, she and the leadership team will continue cutting costs across the company to “try and check some of these” investments.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney asked, “As you’re coming in looking at this brisk, is it clear to you there are a lot of newfound cost efficiencies or ongoing cost efficiencies?”
Ashkenazi responded by saying that in the till period, earnings were boosted by “headcount management, facilities management, other process efficiencies,” and that there’s “assorted to come.”
The new CFO said one way Google can find additional efficiencies is by using AI “within our own processes and how we get work done.”
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