Google Chooses Brazil as Latin American Center of Operations

by: Mark Hendrickson August 08, 2008 | about stocks: GOOG    

Mark Hendrickson

About this author: By this author:
Become a Contributor Submit an Article
  • Font Size:
  • Print

According to the Brazilian news magazine Exame, Google (GOOG) has made Brazil the center of its Latin American operations, placing former country director Alexandre Hohagen at the helm.

Google is understood to have chosen Brazil for its superior regional performance. While the Mountain View, California-based search giant doesn’t comment on regional numbers, the article claims that Brazil is Google’s fastest growing market (hard to verify, but it’s certainly one of the fastest growing), generating an estimated $500 million per year in revenues. This is all the more impressive considering the Brazilian office was opened just three years ago and has only 200 employees.

The decision to run Latin American operations from Brazil comes soon after another decision to move all development and management of Orkut to that country, with most of the engineering in the city of Belo Horizonte. Orkut is Google’s social network, which enjoys most of its popularity in Brazil and India.

Brazil is also said to have the second largest number of Gmail accounts, perhaps because of the popularity of Orkut. Google’s biggest white labeled Gmail customer may also be in Brazil: iG, a portal with over 9 million accounts.

Google is still in the process of replacing Hohagen with a new country director for Brazil.

Original Post

Related Articles

This article has 2 comments:

  •  
    Aug 08 09:44 AM
    Should have chosen Argentina so they could be nationalized in six months..
    Reply | Link to Comment
  •  
    Aug 09 10:55 AM
    Google's new motto - Only do evil in Portuguese

    200 million people of their own who speak Portuguese, and only a click away from 1 billion other Internet users around the world. Virtually no copyright enforcement at all. Of course, Goggle wants to be based out of there.

    Next thing you know, you'll see the air strip, telescopes, and message rooms being constructed.

    Anyone who owns digital content and has followed the evolution of Google's ongoing battles with copyright holders will understand this move completely and probably lose a little more sleep tonight.

    Google has snookered us all once again. Those rocket scientists are a smart lot. Too bad they were apparently never taught anything about ethics out there at Stanford.

    With any luck, the copyright legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate a few weeks back will pass quickly, and the first four countries to get a resident copyright enforcement agency will be the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). If not, copyright holders may want to start looking at some other way to earn a living.

    If you don't believe me, try stopping a company based in Brazil that is distributing pirated goods over the Internet. I highly recommend that you don't waste your money by trying to get any of the Brazilian government agencies involved. Good luck!

    So tell me, copyright owners, what exactly are we going to do now?

    George Riddick
    Chairman/CEO
    Imageline, Inc.

    griddick@imageline2.co...
    Reply | Link to Comment
More Comments on GOOG ยป
Top Rated Comment Streams:

Numbers are net rating-

See all Top 100 »
More by Mark Hendrickson

Investment Resources
Money Management
Research
Seeking Alpha provides these ads as a service to its leading contributors
Articles on related themes
Internet Search
e-Commerce
e-Finance
Internet Advertising