Patrick Pichette
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Great. Thank you, Larry. Thank you for taking a few minutes in the schedule to just drop in. So what we'll do now is we are back. So we found a phone for the last 30 seconds, and we're going to be back now with the rest of the team to go back to our regular call. So as an overview, I'll be giving you the regular speech. Susan and Jeff will give you color comments as well in the product area, as well as the monetization side. And Nikesh is with us so that when we go through Q&A, he'll be answer to give you a lot more color commentary in some areas. Look, we're nothing but very, very excited about our reporting 27% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1. This 27% proves really the logic behind our strategy, not only to invest heavily in our core Search business and Ads but also in our new emerging businesses like Display, like Mobile, like Enterprise. From an investment perspective, our Q1 results don't only show our continued commitment to invest in hiring, in marketing and in the other areas, but they also -- as you can see through our expenses, they reflect, for the first time, the full impact of the compensation changes we announced in Q4, the 10% salary increase. Google is clearly benefiting from and is also fueling the unrelenting pace of the digital economy that's around us. And it's growth that we believe will benefit both Google but in fact, the entire ecosystem for a long time to come. So let's turn to the specifics of our performance for the quarter. Gross revenue, as we mentioned already, 27% to $8.6 billion and interestingly, 2% quarter-over-quarter. To put this in context, this is quite remarkable if you think that Q4 was an amazingly strong quarter. And in fact, it adds also the impact of the Nexus One from Q1 of last year and to a lesser extent, the events that have occurred in Japan. So Google website's revenue was up 32% year-over-year, $5.9 billion, with strength across all major geographies and verticals. The Google Network revenue was up 19% year-over-year to $2.4 billion. That Network revenue was negatively impacted by two things, the loss of a Search distribution partnership deal and also, what has been broadly communicated, by Search quality improvement made during the quarter. Regarding the Search quality improvement, remember that we regularly make such trade-offs. We really believe that the quality improvements that benefit the user always serves us well both in the short term and in the mid term in terms of revenue. So Jeff will cover that in more detail in the coming minutes. Other revenue was down 10% year-over-year to $269 million. And note that in Q1 of 2010 was the first quarter that we'd booked Nexus One revenues, and this is what drives the year-over-year decline. Global aggregate paid click gross -- that's my tongue twister for every quarter. It was very strong again, up 18% year-over-year, interestingly, 4% up also quarter-over-quarter and again, reflecting the accelerated shift of off-line to online. Aggregate cost-per-click growth was also quite healthy, up 8% and only 1% down quarter-over-quarter. And you should all know that the FX had a pretty neutral effect on CPC growth year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Remember too that that's an aggregate number and includes both google.com and our AdSense properties. So now turning to our geographic performance, the U.S. and the rest of world are both growing at a very healthy pace, and our results reflect that. The U.K. continues to lag a bit because of its global economic recovery, the pace of its -- the recovery. Revenue from the U.S. was up 25% year-over-year to $4 billion. In our earnings slides you can find on our Investor Relations website, you will see that we have broken down our revenue by U.S., U.K. and rest of world to show the impact of FX and the benefit of our hedging program. So please refer to those slides for the exact calculations. International revenue accounted for 53% of our total revenue or $4.6 billion, and it was up 28% year-over-year. It includes a $14 million benefit from our hedging program, and that compares to a $10 million benefit of Q1 of last year. If we use a fixed exchange rate, our international revenue would have been roughly $23 million lower year-over-year. Also, it's worth noting that the tragedy in Japan somewhat negatively impacted our international revenue in Q1. And as I mentioned earlier, the U.K. was up 15% year-over-year to $969 million as the country continues to experience struggling economy. But even that 15% is really 17% in FX adjusted basis. Let me turn to expenses. Traffic acquisition costs were $2.0 billion or 25% of total advertising revenue. Our other cost of revenue, $897 million, including stock-based compensation of $49 million. And finally, all operating expenses totaled $2.8 billion, including approximately $383 million in stock-based compensation. The increase year-over-year in OpEx, primarily due to payroll, increased advertising and promotional spend and some other professional services. So a result of all these expenses, our non-GAAP operating profit, which excludes the stock-based compensation, was $3.2 billion in Q1 of this year, resulting in a non-GAAP operating margin of 37.6%. Headcount was up approximately 1,900 people from Q4, ending the quarter with 26,316 full-time employees. Our effective tax rate was 21% roughly. The exact number is 20.5%. Let we now turn to cash management. Our other income and expenses was $96 million for Q1, in fact, a very solid performance from our portfolio management. And unfortunately, just masked by the impact of our higher hedging expenses associated with our SFAS 133, the accounting of which we know is quite volatile from quarter to quarter. So for more details on OI&E, please again refer to the slides that accompany our call on our IR site. Operating cash flow, very strong, $3.2 billion. CapEx for the quarter, $890 million, significantly below last quarter of $2.5 billion. And remember that last quarter, that increase was largely due to our purchase of the New York City office. Majority of CapEx spend in Q1 was related to facilities, expenses and data center operations. In the facility space, we spent -- was really driven by the purchase of two buildings, one in Dublin and one in Paris. Just as a reminder, we continue to make significant CapEx investments, and we've shown those to be lumpy from quarter to quarter depending on when we're able to make such investments. Obviously, we're pleased with our free cash flow, which was $2.3 billion for the quarter. As I said earlier, our accelerating growth trajectory, it really shows our confidence to expand across products and geographies. Roughly 18 months ago, we began communicating how we were really optimistic about our opportunities, and we had the business confidence to invest heavily in the next phase of innovation and revenue generation. Well, our product innovation over the last 18 months has been nothing short but extraordinary. Let's take a look at this. We have built from scratch the world's most popular smartphone operating system. We've built also from scratch the world's fastest growing browser. And in some countries like India, one in four people are now accessing the web via Chrome. We've reinvented display advertising, creating not only a business but an entire ecosystem with a $2.5 billion annual run rate as of Q3 of last year. We've pushed the frontier of mobile search, creating a whole new search segment that is adding to our overall search volume and brand new monetization opportunities. We've seen YouTube develop into a platform, a win-win platform in fact, where partners can generate significant revenue from their content and users watch 2 billion views a day. And our revenue growth clearly shows the wisdom of those decisions to fuel our growth ahead of the curve. So the facts speak [ph] from the sales really. The second half of 2010, we grew roughly 25% year-over-year. But even more telling, this quarter, growth rate of 27% compared to a comp of 23% just a year ago. We are building multibillion dollar businesses, and we're confident that now is the time to invest. It's with this optimism that we'll continue to do so aggressively but with discipline, with strong focus on fueling the winning products. From an expense point of view, we're taking some bold steps but always with good strategic rationale in mind and discipline in mind. So as our Q1 results continue to reflect some marketing -- you've heard of our marketing going up. It's a very deliberate choice as an example. We have laid, made very specific focus on Chrome, customer and advertiser acquisition in the U.S. and international markets. And in both cases, we're seeing the fruits of these investments. The same is true for our labor strategy. And finally, we continue to invest in our long-term infrastructure. So now let me turn it over to Jeff and Susan to provide you more details on the products that are the engine of both our growth and our optimism. They'll also provide you more details on where we're deploying some of these additional resources as they're coming on board. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jeff.