Alphabet Inc.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for standing by for the Alphabet Q3 2021 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 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 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 third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. With us today are Sundar Pichai, Philip Schindler, 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 forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP 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.investor. And now, I'll turn the call over to Sundar.

Thank you, Jim, and good afternoon, everyone. In 2016, I laid out our vision to become an AI-first company. Five years later, this quarter's results show how our investments in AI are building more helpful products for people and for our partners in local communities. Today, I'll begin with new product highlights, then I'll cover our cloud business, followed by YouTube. First, product highlights. Search remains the heart of what we do. We've made remarkable advances over the past 23 years that benefit search and related products like Google Assistant. We've just celebrated five years. Earlier this year, we announced that we reached a significant milestone with Multitask Unified Model, or MUM for short. MUM is a thousand times more powerful than BERT and can understand information across many contexts, like text and images. At our search ornament in September, we shared how we are using MUM to improve Google Lens so people can search using both images and words. We also shared that we are bringing a more visual shopping experience to search, powered by the Google Shopping Graph. It links shoppers with over 24 billion product listings from merchants across the web. Google Maps now offers eco-friendly routing. It lets drivers in the U.S. choose a more fuel-efficient route, saving money and reducing emissions. Maps now has a wildfire layer so that people can get up-to-date details and make quick, informed decisions during emergencies. Finally, in Search and our Discover feed, we are continuing to support the news ecosystem and make quality journalism more accessible. Philip will give a bit more detail about our new showcase partnerships. Turning next to hardware, I hope you saw our Fall Pixel event last week. I'm very excited about the range of Pixel phones available this holiday season. The new Pixel 6 and 6 Pro bring together the best of Google AI, software, and hardware with the most advanced and inclusive cameras we've ever built. They're beautiful, fast, and powered by Google Tensor, a first-ever system on a chip. It's specifically built to support Google AI and machine learning on-device and provides a long-term foundation for our Pixel devices. We also introduced our new Nest Renew program, which uses Nest thermostats to support clean energy use in the home. On to Android. Android 12 is getting great reviews. It's the biggest design change in Android's history with new widgets to personalize your phone. We also introduced accessibility features that use gestures to control your phone and communicate. Android 12 is secure by default and private by design. New dashboards and indicators make it easier to view and adjust privacy permissions and disable access to device sensors and location information. We've also made progress with the Made for India affordable smartphone co-developed with Reliance. The GeoPhone Next device features premium localized capabilities and is on track to launch in market by Diwali. On to cloud, where we see continued momentum with Q3 revenue growing 45% year-over-year, with GCP's revenue growth rate above cloud overall. At Cloud Next two weeks ago, we unveiled hundreds of new capabilities, services, and solutions. We also announced 20 new and expanded partnerships to support the growth and scale of our customers around the world. More than any other top cloud provider, Google Cloud has unique capabilities to meet the needs of enterprises, digital natives, and SMBs around the world. I'll highlight three. First, our leadership in real-time data, analytics, and AI is winning customers like Carrefour Belgium, Deutsche Post DHL, and Wendy's, who are unlocking data to deliver unique business outcomes. BigQuery, our leading data warehouse solution, is reducing costs and driving productivity at Cardinal Health and ATB Financial. Our differentiated AI and ML-based industry solutions are helping leading global companies. GE Appliances, a higher company, is integrating Vision AI into their next-generation smart home appliances. and IKEA Retail is using Recommendations AI to drive a 30% increase in customer click-through rate. Second, customers see value in our open, scalable infrastructure that enables them to run workloads anywhere, on our cloud, at the edge, or in their data centers. Rodan Fields scaled its SAP environment. Siemens Energy is migrating its global network of data centers and company-wide SAP systems. And Indonesia's largest technology digital native, Goto Group, is supporting over 100 million monthly active users with Google Cloud. General Mills, Bell Canada, and Wells Fargo are harnessing our leadership in multi-cloud and our open development environment. And to meet the unique digital sovereignty needs of customers around the world, we announced industry-first partnerships with T-Systems in Germany and Thales in France. Third, as consumers, businesses, and schools continue their shift towards hybrid work, the threats of cybersecurity continue to increase. Customers are turning to Google Workspace and our cybersecurity platform to provide the ease of use, collaboration, and security they need. These include organizations like Discovery, Common Spirit Health, and the state of Maryland, who want to foster creativity while securely protecting their users. We are also seeing strong growth in our broad portfolio of cybersecurity products. This includes Chronicle, one of our zero-trust offerings, which JetBlue uses to detect cybersecurity threats, helping to protect its customers and enterprise. We are bringing our team's deep expertise to customers through the Google Cybersecurity Action Team and a new Work Safer program, which provides best-in-class security for emails, meetings, messaging, and more. Earlier, I mentioned a few of the sustainability-related product features we announced. Our cloud customers already benefit from operating on the world's cleanest cloud, and last year, we set an ambitious goal to run our data centers and campuses on 24-7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Two-thirds of the electricity consumed by Google data centers in 2020 was matched with local carbon-free sources on an hourly basis. And our new carbon footprint tool gives customers carbon emissions insights associated with their Google Cloud platform usage. Now, over to YouTube for a few highlights. We recently surpassed 50 million music and premium subscribers, including those in trial. And YouTube Shorts continues to see higher adoption rates. In the past year, the average number of daily first-time creators more than doubled. Next week, as global leaders gather in Glasgow to address climate change, YouTube is partnering with COP26 to livestream conference activities, making the event more accessible for everyone. As we grow, we are maintaining our open global platform responsibly by removing harmful content and reducing borderline content. Both our AI investments and the promotion of trusted sources have helped us significantly lower the violated view rate, which is the percentage of views on YouTube from content that violates our policies. On to our other bets. Waymo began welcoming riders to its Trusted Tester program in San Francisco, in addition to its fully autonomous ride-hailing service currently in Phoenix. Next year, Waymo will open a dedicated trucking hub in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, helping support commercial freight routes across the Southwest. And we announced last week the first commercial expansion of Wink's on-demand air delivery service to Walgreens customers in select locations. To close, the world is slowly starting to travel and meet up in person. And this quarter, I joined events virtually to celebrate some big milestones in regions around the world. Earlier this month, we announced a $1 billion investment in Africa over five years to support the continent's digital transformation. And September marked 20 years since we opened our first office outside of the U.S. in Tokyo. We now have thousands of employees in 28 offices across the Asia-Pacific region, and we are investing in cloud regions and digital skills programs to help expand economic opportunity there. As you can see, our business in NAPAC is growing really well. In Africa, Asia Pacific, and beyond, it's been a successful quarter, and we have lots more innovation and product development on the way. Thanks to our employees around the world for their contributions. As we continue our move to hybrid work, I hope to see more of you in person soon. Thank you, and over to Philip.