Alphabet Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Alphabet Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jim Friedland, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Alphabet's second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. With us today are Sundar Pichai and Ruth Peratt. Now, I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations, and financial performance, including the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on those areas, may be considered forward looking. and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K, filed with the SEC, and in our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2020, expected to be filed with the SEC later today. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-gap-to-gap measures is included in today's earnings press release, which is distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website located at abc.xyz slash investor. And now, I'll turn the call over to Sundar.

Thank you, Jim, and thank you, everyone, for joining in. It's certainly been a busy week, and I'm glad to be here. I hope everyone is staying safe and well. All of us at Google continue to send our deepest gratitude to everyone on the front lines of the pandemic all around the world. I also want to personally thank all our employees who continue to work so hard to make sure our products and services are available for everyone right now. People looking for important health information, hard-hit businesses working to inform customers about opening hours or delivery options, or teachers connecting to their students. The macroeconomic environment caused by the pandemic created headwinds for our business. Our revenue declined on a reported basis and is flat year over year on a fixed-effects basis. Like other companies, this quarter we saw the early signs of stabilization as users returned to commercial activity online. This was true across most of our advertising verticals and geographies. Of course, the economic climate remains fragile. One thing I'd like to call out is our continuing journey to invest in and grow new businesses. We delivered strong growth in our non-ad revenues, particularly from cloud, Google Play, and YouTube subscriptions. This, in turn, is helping our partners, developers, and creators earn revenue and deliver valuable services to people. We are focused on the steps to build long-term value with these opportunities. Today I'll review the quarter by walking through the four key areas for 2020 that you've heard me mention over the last several quarters. Creating the most helpful products for everyone, providing the most trusted experiences for our users, executing at scale, and creating sustainable value. First, creating the most helpful products for everyone. This has been especially important during this time. We have focused on providing locally relevant, helpful, and authoritative information about COVID in over 70 languages in 200 countries. This has been an enormous effort across Search and all our products. YouTube, for example, engaged with public health officials in over 90 countries and surfaces panels with locally relevant information in response to COVID-19 queries. On Google Maps and Search, we now display more than 12,000 COVID-19 testing centers across 20 countries working with local governments and data providers to source accurate and helpful information. Using our technical capabilities, we are helping people find more information about local businesses, such as takeout, curbside, updated hours, donations, gift cards, and virtual services. With more kids at home, Google Play launched a special Kids tab with only teacher-approved apps. And YouTube has seen traction with Learn at Home, as well as a virtual summer camp for kids, called Camp YouTube, plus a virtual commencement series. To help Indian Internet users, we announced the Google for India Digitization Fund. Through this effort, we'll invest approximately $10 billion over the next five to seven years to accelerate and participate in India's burgeoning digital economy. We'll enable information in local languages and apply technology and AI to important areas like health, education, and agriculture. Geo Platforms is the first partnership agreement in the fund and will work with them to help millions of users in India become owners of smartphones. Second, providing trusted experiences for our users. Doing even more to protect users' privacy, keep information safe, and provide high-quality information was a key focus this quarter. In one important update, we now set people's location history and web and app activity to delete automatically after 18 months as the default. We also integrated password checkup into our core security checkup to help people detect any instance of their online accounts being compromised. More than 100 million people have used it. Android 11 Beta launched this quarter with many new features to help people better manage their connected devices. It contains a significant focus on privacy and security, including more granular control over app permissions and restrictions on apps usage of background location. Our Exposure Notifications API for Android and iOS, developed with Apple, launched this quarter. It's designed to empower public health agencies to create apps to help fight the spread of COVID with the strongest user privacy safeguards. As of today, authorities have rolled out official apps in 12 countries to alert people that they were in contact with another person who tested positive for the virus and that they should isolate and get tested. We expect several more apps to launch in the next week or two, including the first state apps in the U.S. We are also focused on election security efforts around the globe, whether it's removing coordinated foreign influence operations, prevent hacking and phishing attempts, or enforcing our political ad policies that require transparency and prohibit narrow micro-targeting. Moving on now to executing at scale. All businesses are adjusting to work from home, and we are no exception. While building products across distributed teams was new for us, this experience allowed us to make good use of our infrastructure investments and productivity tools. G Suite products, in particular Google Meet, have been absolutely critical. And we quickly re-engineered it and made it available widely to help millions of other businesses and organizations connect and collaborate. One area where we have executed really well to improve the user and merchant experience in the last year is shopping. We know that we and merchants face incredible competition for consumer attention and wallets. We are helping merchants lower their costs and improve their reach in a few ways. They can now list their products for free on the Google Shopping tab and on Search, helping them drive more traffic and making our results more comprehensive and useful. We also recently announced that sellers on Buy on Google will no longer pay us a commission fee. Plus, we are giving retailers more choice by opening our platform to third-party providers, starting with PayPal and Shopify. Shopping ads also continue to be a great tool for merchants. With new visual features for retailers, such as smart shopping campaigns that let customers know about free shipping, we are continually adding more ways for advertisers to reach shoppers. Now let me talk about our fourth area, building sustainable value. which is all about driving business value for our partners and investing smartly in new areas. In our advertising business, our focus is on helping businesses find customers as they work to rebuild and recover. We gave search advertisers the ability to add high-quality images to their ads, helping shoppers quickly see products to consider and take action faster. We added features to make video ads more easily shoppable and browsable on YouTube as more businesses are shifting to online to offset physical store closures. For SMBs, we are proud that so many are taking advantage of new features, including smart campaigns to reach new online audiences and promoted pins on Google Maps to let customers know that their businesses are open. And to empower businesses to understand in an easy and visual way what products people are searching for during the special circumstances that COVID-19 has created. The rising retail categories, too, surfaces fast-growing product-related categories. As I mentioned earlier, beyond advertising revenue, we see good traction in areas such as YouTube subscriptions, Google Play, and Cloud. YouTube Premium music and TV subscriptions perform well during the quarter. We are seeing strong demand for these services and are adding content regularly, including many Viacom networks like BET and Comedy Central. In Q2, Google Play app and game downloads were up more than 35% year-over-year, which means that revenue for developers continued to grow. Let me go a bit deeper on class. In the first half of 2020, technology and innovation proved to be a significant recovery mechanism for businesses. Those who are shifting to digital and embracing a spirit to innovate are evolving and growing. Our commitment to bringing innovative products to market, building and scaling our go-to-market organization, and strengthening our partner network helped us continue to meet the growing needs of our customers this quarter. We see two distinct trends as businesses embrace the future of work. First, the future of business will be more digital. Customers are choosing Google Cloud to either lower their costs by improving operating efficiency or to drive innovation through digital transformation. Brands like Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Deutsche Bank, Lowe's, Telefonica, Orange, and Group Renault. And we are helping many government agencies deliver care for their citizens, including the states of Oklahoma and New York here in the U.S. and Italy and Spain in Europe. Second, the future of work will be more collaborative. Virtual collaboration is critical in order to adapt and succeed in the changing global landscape. In Q2, we saw continued demand from customers using G Suite to help their employees work from home, including Wipro in India, and expanded our relationship with the state of Arizona here in the U.S. Our customers are using G Suite tools across industries in new ways, whether it be financial advisors working with clients, doctors and nurses turning to telemedicine, or teachers educating students with remote learning. In Q2, we peaked at more than 600 million Meet participants in a single week. As one example, PwC employees reached nearly 10 million hours of video conferencing in Google Meet in a single month. To make collaboration easier for everyone, we introduced an integrated workspace for Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Drive on mobile and desktop. Our cloud product strategy is differentiated and our investments in direct sales and indirect distribution are beginning to deliver results. Before I move to other bets, I want to note that our hardware team continues to make good progress, and I'm excited by the new upcoming devices we have coming this fall. And finally, in our other bets, Waymo announced that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles will work with Waymo as its strategic partner for L4 autonomous technology across their full portfolio. It also entered into a partnership agreement with Volvo Car Group to work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new electric vehicle platform for ride-hailing services. Finally, Waymo closed its externally-led investment round, bringing the total funding to $3.2 billion, which includes investment from Alphabet. And Weng's drone delivery service started delivering library books to students in Virginia. In closing, It's an important and uncertain time in the world. We're all grappling with a pandemic and a struggling economy, but also reckoning with centuries of injustice that affect our Black communities every day. John Lewis's funeral today provides a timely reminder of the struggle. In June, we announced a significant package of commitments to help our Black Plus community internally at Google, as well as the wider Black community. This included product experiences that matter to Black users, including the option for business owners to identify their business as Black-owned in Google Maps and Search. We also announced a $175 million economic opportunity package to support Black business owners, startup founders, job seekers, and developers, in addition to YouTube's $100 million fund to amplify Black creators and artists. We commit to contributing to long-term meaningful change, both externally and within Google. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Ruth.