Alphabet’s incoming CFO Anat Ashkenazi spent 23 years at Eli Lilly
Eli Lilly and Company
For nine years, he served as financial officer of Google and its parent company letter Played by Ruth Porat, who left Wall Street for Silicon Valley in 2015 with a huge paycheck.
Porat’s successor, Anat Ashkenazi, made her debut on an earnings call on Tuesday and said one of her top priorities will be to improve “cost efficiencies” across the company, an effort that It was launched by her predecessor, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
“The work initiated by Ruth, Sundar and the rest of the leadership team to redesign the cost base has been done really well,” Ashkenazi, who spent 23 years at drugmaker Eli Lilly, said on the call indicated above. “But I think any organization can take it a step further and I’ll be looking for more opportunities.”
Ashkenazi joined Alphabet in July, nearly a year after the company announced that Porat would take on the new role of president and chief investment officer. Her appearance on Tuesday came after Alphabet reported third-quarter earnings that beat estimates on both top and bottom lines, driven by strong revenue growth at the company’s search and cloud divisions.
Alphabet shares are up 21% this year and rose another 5.8% in after-hours trading after the report.
The company is working to maintain its dominance in search advertising as artificial intelligence upstarts such as OpenAI and Perplexity grow in popularity. There’s also TikTok, which recently allowed brands to target ads based on search queries, and Amazon and Yuanunder development conversational Artificial intelligence tools.
In order to adapt to the changing competitive landscape and economic changes, Google has laid off employees and initiated internal restructuring. Ashkenazy said one of her top priorities is to seek “further efficiencies” across the organization so that the company can invest in new areas and maintain competitive advantage and profitability.
Alphabet reported capital spending of $13 billion in the third quarter, and Ashkenazy said she expected the same level of spending in the fourth quarter. Much of the funding is for technology infrastructure, including servers and data center equipment that power cloud and artificial intelligence products, Ashkenazy said on the call.
She added that the cloud is a top area that “requires investment” and pointed to the need to expand artificial intelligence products.
Ashkenazi warned that the company will make higher capital expenditures in 2025, echoing the sentiments of Pichai, who said of Search and Coud, “There is an aggressive roadmap for 2025.” Askenazi said the investments were based on customer demand and therefore “will translate into revenue within a fairly short period of time.”
At the same time, she and the leadership team will continue to cut costs across the company to “try to offset some of these” investments.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney asked, “When you came in and looked at this new thing, was it clear to you that there were a lot of newfound cost efficiencies or ongoing cost efficiencies?”
Ashkenazy responded that “efficiencies in employee management, facilities management and other processes” had improved profitability in recent times and that “more improvements are to come.”
The new chief financial officer said one way Google can improve efficiency is by using artificial intelligence “in our own processes and the way we get things done.”
watch: Google search benefits from generating artificial intelligence
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