Back in August, Google surprised just about everyone by announcing a restructure that’ll result in Google be merged into a new company called Alphabet. After today, that whole change will be complete.
Google says that at the end of business today, October 2, it expects that its Alphabet merger will be complete. That means that once the NASDAQ Global Select Market opens on October 5, Google Class A Common Stock and Google Class C Capital Stock will begin trading as Alphabet Class A Common Stock and Google Class G Capital Stock.
Here’s Google’s full announcement on the matter:
“Google Inc. announced today that, pursuant to its previously announced plans to create a new public holding company, Alphabet Inc. (“Alphabet”), by implementing a holding company reorganization (the “Alphabet Merger”), it expects that the Alphabet Merger will close after the close of business on October 2, 2015. Google anticipates that shares of Google Class C Capital Stock and shares of Google Class A Common Stock will begin trading as Alphabet Class C Capital Stock and Alphabet Class A Common Stock, respectively, on the NASDAQ Global Select Market on October 5, 2015. Shares of Alphabet Class C Capital Stock and shares of Alphabet Class A Common Stock will continue to be traded under the same ticker symbols under GOOG and GOOGL, respectively.”
Once the merger is complete, Google will be a part of Alphabet. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be Alphabet’s CEO and President, respectively, and Sundar Pichai will be the new Google CEO. Things like Android, YouTube, and Maps will remain with Google, while things like Google Fiber, Nest, and Google X — Google’s lab for “moonshot” products — will be spun out from Google and will be under the larger Alphabet umbrella.
Ultimately, this whole reorg doesn’t mean much to us consumers. Android will continue to be Android, YouTube and Maps will continue to function as they have, and so on. This change is more about spinning Google’s more ambitious projects out from Google and putting them under Alphabet and giving them more freedom than they had before.