MGT703: Strategic Management Report on Google LLC Strategies

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the corporate strategies employed by Google LLC, examining various aspects of its operations. The analysis begins with an executive summary that highlights key strategies such as vertical and horizontal integration, a robust CSR policy, and diversity management. The report then delves into Google's corporate-level strategies, including horizontal and vertical integration, cooperative relationships like outsourcing and strategic alliances, and diversification strategies. It explores Google's governance, social responsibility, and ethical practices, assessing them through the lens of stakeholder theory and the balance scorecard. Furthermore, the report evaluates Google's organizational structure, culture, and diversity practices, including performance measurement and control mechanisms. The report concludes with recommendations for strengthening Google's position in emerging markets and expanding into new markets, along with empowering national-level management bodies. The report draws on academic literature and secondary sources to provide a detailed overview of Google's strategic approach.

Running head: CORPORATE STRATEGIES OF GOOGLE LLC
Corporate Strategies of Google LLC
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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CORPORATE STRATEGIES OF GOOGLE LLC
Executive Summary:
It transpires from the discussion that Google is a multinational conglomerate which
adopts several strategies which has attributed it with the global position it boasts. First of all, the
company in order to expand its product line adopts strategies like vertical and horizontal
integration. The company has a strong CSR policy which sits deep within its product line. The
company also practices diversity management.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary:........................................................................................................................1
1. Introduction:................................................................................................................................5
1.1 Purpose:.............................................................................................................................5
1.2. Limitations:...............................................................................................................................5
1.3. Scope:.......................................................................................................................................6
1.4. Conglomerate Company’s overview/background including its vision, mission and
objectives.........................................................................................................................................6
2.0. Corporate Level Strategies (within the past 5 years)................................................................8
Define/discuss the importance of Corporate Strategies:..............................................................8
2.1 Horizontal integration:......................................................................................................9
Acquisition:..................................................................................................................................9
Merger:......................................................................................................................................10
2.2 Vertical integration:........................................................................................................10
2.3 Cooperative relationships................................................................................................11
Outsourcing:..............................................................................................................................11
Strategic alliances:.....................................................................................................................11
2.4 Diversification:................................................................................................................11
Related Diversification:.............................................................................................................11
Unrelated Diversification:.........................................................................................................11

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Restructuring:............................................................................................................................12
3. Governance, Social Responsibility, Stakeholders & Ethics:....................................................12
3.1 Evaluate your conglomerate organisation (including all business units) in terms of how it
practices governance, social responsibility and ethics:.............................................................12
Use the Balance Score card in evaluating your organisation’s performance strengths and
limitations:.................................................................................................................................12
Evaluate how the organisation is able to practice or not able to practice CSR and to address the
rights of Stakeholders (i.e. Stakeholder theory) . Evaluate the ethical practices of the
organisation and support your discussion/analysis with relevant academic literatures:............13
4. Organisational Structure, Culture, Diversity & Performance Measurement:.......................14
4.1 Evaluate your organisation’s (including all business units) in terms of the organisational
culture, culture and performance measurement:........................................................................14
What is the organisation’s organisational structure including its culture?................................14
How is organisational performance in the different business unit including functional areas
monitored? What control mechanisms including incentives are used?....................................15
Evaluate how diversity (including inclusion) is practised within the organisation. What are
some of the diversity strengths and limitations?........................................................................15
4.0 Conclusion:..............................................................................................................................15
5.0 Recommendations:..................................................................................................................15
Strengthening positions in the emerging markets and expanding into new markets:................15
Empowering of national level management bodies:..................................................................16

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6.0. References:.............................................................................................................................17

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1. Introduction:
1.1 Purpose:
The purpose of the assignment is to explore the different areas of the core operations of
multinational business conglomerate. The core strategies form the base of all the operations of
multinational business conglomerates. The research would delve into five areas of corporate
level strategies of governance, corporate social responsibility and ethics, culture, structure and
performance measurements in a particular market. The company chosen for the research would
be none other than global information and communication technology business conglomerate,
Google. The country chosen for the research would be Australia.
1.2. Limitations:
The research would suffer from several limitations in terms of collection of data. As
already mentioned above, the crux of the assignment would be corporate strategy of Google.
Corporate strategies are of extreme confidentiality to global business conglomerates like Google.
Hence, it would not be able feasible to gain core business strategies of the conglomerate. The
content of the report would be restricted to the secondary information gained from the data about
Google available on the internet. The information for the research would be gained from
secondary sources of information like journals, newspapers, magazines and last but the least, the
official website of the global business conglomerate, Google. The second limitation which the
analysis would suffer from would be limitation of time. It must be pointed out that in order to
conduct a thorough research about the corporate strategies of global business conglomerates like
Google, a lot of time has to be dedicated. However, in this case, the research has to be completed
within a predefined time period. Hence, the researcher would aim to incorporate the maximum

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possible amount of information gathered from several mentioned secondary sources of
information into the research.
1.3. Scope:
The scope of the research would be five areas of corporate strategies of Google Australia.
The five areas of corporate strategies which would be incorporated in the study are governance,
social responsibility and ethics, culture, structure and performance measurements. The company
considered would be Google and the country Australia. The content of the research would be
based on the information gained from information pertaining to last 5 years.
1.4. Conglomerate Company’s overview/background including its vision, mission and
objectives.
Google LLC is one of the world information and communication technology which
markets its products on the digital platform. The company operates under the leadership of Mr.
Sundar Pichai and in based in the United States of America. Google LLC has direct presence
more than thirty nations in the world. The main markets of the company are in North America,
Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa & Middle East. As far as Australia, is concerned,
the conglomerate has offices in Melbourne and Sydney (About.google. 2019). The corporate
mission statement of Google is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful.” The vision of the conglomerate is, “to provide access to the world’s
information in one click.” The business objective of Google LLC to provide easy and affordable
internet services to users both individual and business consumers which would enable the latter
enjoy a vast range of services with just ‘one click’. It can in fact be pointed out that the various
products marketed by Google mentioned below actually personify the vision of the company.
The products can be accessed by consumers by simply clicking on the respective icons of the

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services. In fact, the Android OS, one of most preferred operating system of smart phones is
owned by the company and is compatible with almost all the apps. This compatibility of Google
products with a variety of gadgets like smart phones, tablets and laptops coupled with the global
physical presence of Google LLC have made the company a global leader in the information and
communication market.
The products of Google LLC consists of a variety of internet products which target both
the individual consumers and business consumers. The conglomerate owns and operates one of
the most used search engines in the world used by individuals and companies alike namely,
google.com. The conglomerate owns products like gmail.com, Chrome,Google Finance and
Google Pay all of which are used by both individual consumers and firms. The products like
Google Ads and Google Cloud Platforms are meant for business use only. The conglomerate also
owns Youtube which is one of its subsidiaries. Google due to vast range of online products
competes with global companies around the world. The conglomerate competes with Amazon,
the largest ecommerce company in the world in terms of products like Youtube and Google Pay.
Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay of Amazon compete with Youtube and Google Pay respectively
owned by Google. Similarly, in terms of cloud computing products namely, Google Cloud
Platform and Google Cloud Print, the conglomerate competes with Amazon and Microsoft. The
internet search engine google.com competes with Yahoo.com and Rediff.com owned by Yahoo
and Rediff respectively. Similarly, Gmail, the email service provided by Google competes with
their Yahoo and Rediff counterparts. Google Flights, the flight booking services provided by
Google competes with the airline and flight booking companies around the world.

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CORPORATE STRATEGIES OF GOOGLE LLC
2.0. Corporate Level Strategies (within the past 5 years)
Define/discuss the importance of Corporate Strategies:
Corporate strategies are the strategies made by the highest level of authority of a business
company. Foucault and Frésard (2018) define the term corporate strategy is the strategic plan of
the company which is made by the apex management. The corporate strategies made by the apex
management covers the corporate mission and the vision of the company concerned. The
corporate strategies as per Spear and Roper (2016) shed light on the strategic goals which the
company aims to achieve in the short, medium and long term. The apex management as a part of
the corporate strategies review the performances achieved in the past periods like the previous
financial year and milestones which have to be achieved. Jubaedah, Yulivan and Hadi (2016) add
to the discussion by pointing out that apex management while making the corporate strategies
takes into account the macroeconomic factors which influence the business operations of the
company and consider the changes which are taking place in the market environment. The apex
managers also form strategies which have to be implemented in order to adapt the prevailing and
future external market conditions. Shaukat, Qiu and Trojanowski (2016) opine that corporate
strategies are largely based on the financial performances of the company to outline future
strategies which have to take adopted in order to achieve higher financial performances. Thus, it
transpires from the discussion that corporate strategies of a company can be defined as the
strategies which are made at the apex level. The strategies encompass but are not limited to
crucial aspects like setting of business targets, reestablishing the corporate mission and vision
and corporate finance. As far as Google LLC is concerned, the corporate strategy making of the
conglomerate are commences under the leadership of Mr. Pichai, its present CEO and Mrs Ruth
Porat, the present CFO.

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Figure 1. An excerpt of the Consolidated statements of income data
(Source: Sec.gov 2019)
2.1 Horizontal integration:
Horizontal integration is the strategy which business organisations adopt to increase their
product line by acquiring firms operating in the same industry. Bauer, Matzler and Wolf (2016)
define the term horizontal integration as the process of expansion of a business firms by pooling
resources from firm within the industry. The multinational business conglomerates like Google
LLC implements horizontal integration by using two strategies namely, acquisition and merger.
Acquisition:
Arikan and Stulz (2016) define the term acquisition as the strategic process in which a
firm or business conglomerate acquires the stock and assets of smaller companies.

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Conglomerates like Google use strategic acquisition to achieve two main business targets. First
of all, acquisition of a firm also gives ownership of the products of the firm acquired. Thus,
acquisition allows the Google to expand its product line. Secondly, acquisitions enable the
conglomerates to increase the number of the companies in the conglomerate which means
increase in the value of assets. For example, Alphabet, the holding company of Google acquired
Youtube which is a video streaming site in 2006. This enabled Google to expand its presence
into the video streaming market which expanded its product line at that time. This is evident
from the fact that Youtube is one of the most used video streaming platforms. Youtube at present
is used by business organisations to promote their products and Youtube promotion is one of the
most deadly advertising strategies used by the companies to attract customers (Schwemmer and
Ziewiecki 2018).
Merger:
Merger as per Jagtiani and Maingi (2018) can be defined as the method of business
expansion in which two companies merge to form a third company to exploit the resources of
each other. Whirlpool, the global manufacturer of white goods merged with Google to use its
resources to transform its operations (Cloud.google.com. 2019)
2.2 Vertical integration:
Argyres and Mostafa (2016) defines vertical integration as the situation when one
company acquires its own suppliers. The aim of vertical integration is to gain access to resources
of suppliers. For example, Google in order to reduce dependence on the third party payment
gateways, Google extended its product line to form Google Pay. This allowed the company to
compete more strongly with its competitors like Amazon.

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2.3 Cooperative relationships
Outsourcing:
Foiji, Hoque and Khan (2019) define outsourcing as the business operations in which
companies hire third party companies to operate on their behalf. For example, Google LLC
outsources its customer care service to smaller third party companies.
Strategic alliances:
Albers, Wohlgezogen and Zajac (2016) define strategic alliance as the agreement
between two or more companies to achieve predetermined business objectives. For example,
Google enters into strategic alliances with other IT giants like Apple to bring about more
developed products.
2.4 Diversification:
Ribeiro et al. (2016) define diversification as the strategy which business companies
apply to expand their product line. For example, Google diversified into different markets which
includes flight booking and online payment systems.
Related Diversification:
Related diversification of companies refer to the process when companies enters into
business agreements with companies at the same stage of production. For example, Google
enters into contracts with different software companies to manufacture software.
Unrelated Diversification:
Unrelated diversification consist of agreements between companies in different stages of
production. The aim of unrelated diversification is to lower the cost of production.