$30 Billion of Google Overseas Money Is Said to Go On Foreign Acquisitions

You may not know this, but Google’s largest source of revenue is outside the United States. Reports updated until March this year show that Google overseas money totaled $34.5 billion in cash, with another $25 billion totaled in the country. Interested in the subject, the Securities and Exchange Commission started to ask Google questions regarding its overseas cash.

We don’t want to jump to the wrong conclusions here, but it is no secret that Google was criticized for keeping money outside the U.S. in order to avoid paying taxes. Perhaps this is the reason why the SEC asked the tech giant to disclose the plans and financial strategies which were related to the money the company held abroad.

The documents presented to the SEC showed that Google aimed to spend around $30 billion on foreign acquisitions. By that it means that Google plans to buy companies outside the United States to add to their portfolio and invest in new technological rights. However, Google wasn’t able to give the SEC a list of potential candidates for takeover, nor a clear deadline for completing the foreign acquisitions process.

According to the news surfacing yesterday, Google told the inspectors from SEC that

the acquisitions would be a part of its overall growth strategy, and that the trend was for the sizes of deals to get bigger. Last year, Google spent about $1.4 billion on more than 20 strategic deals, including the $1 billion acquisition of Waze, a digital mapping service which is based in Israel.

Besides the fact that $30 billion of Google overseas money is said to go on foreign acquisitions, there is still an itching problem related to paying taxes in foreign countries. British and French regulators frowned upon Google’s decision to book revenue in Ireland (a country with lower tax levels), saying the Mountain View, California company did so to avoid paying taxes in their countries. When pressed by lawmakers to pay their fair share of taxes around the world, Google’s shareholders refused the proposal with an overwhelming majority of 90%.

To conclude, the tech titan doesn’t have plans to pay taxes, but to buy a lot of things. The explanations given to SEC also also contain data related to other financial plans involving Google overseas money:

Besides buying foreign companies, Google also may spend about $4 billion buying offices and data centers outside the U.S.

Google’s expansion in the world is almost breathtaking and the company has no intention to stop here. Moreover, Google declared that they aim to contribute to the development of the mobile world to proudly bear its ads:

Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future, and thus our advertising systems are becoming increasingly device-agnostic.