14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been acquiring companies left and right in 2010 and there's still a couple of months left in the year. The company has revealed that it has acquired 40 companies in the first three quarters of 2010.
"In August 2010, we completed the acquisition of Slide, Inc. (Slide), a privately-held social technology company for a cash consideration of $179 million," Google revealed in a regulatory SEC filing.
"In May 2010, we completed the acquisition of AdMob... [for] $681 million, consisting of the issuance of approximately 1.2 million shares of our Class A common stock and assumed vested options valued at $655 million, and cash of $26 million," the company said.
"The purchase price for [On2] was $123 million, consisting of the issuance of approximately 174,000 shares of our Class A common stock valued at $95 million, based on the closing price of our Class A common stock on February 19, 2010, and cash of $28 million," it added.
In total, Google has spent $1.6 billion in acquisitions. Note that two of the biggest deals, the AdMob acquisition and the On2 acquisition, were both started and announced in 2009, but only completed in 2010.
In the case of On2, shareholders wanted to hold out for better pricing. With AdMob, the FTC investigated possible anti-trust issues since Google already dominates web advertising.
Google's biggest potential acquisition of the year, ITA, is still under investigation from the FTC and hasn't been approved yet. Google is prepared to pay $700 million for the flight data and software provider.
As an interesting sidenote, Google preferred to pay for its acquisitions with stock rather than cash. However, the company later purchased about $801 million worth of shares from the market to make up for the loss.
Google has over $33 billion in cash, so acquisition costs are hardly an issue for the company which has said that it plans to open up its purse in 2010.