Pichai says that he sees Google and Apple working together in the future
Sure, Sundar did drop Tim Cook’s name but he is one of the few people in the world allowed to. In fact, he says that Apple’s CEO meets with him “periodically.” And he did state that he is interested in working with Apple on other projects in the future and said that Cook feels the same about working with Google again. Commenting on recent reports that Google is going to be hit with antitrust suits by the state and federal governments, Pichai states, “The scrutiny is not new for us. I think it is a proper function of a society to scrutinize large companies. We are in many ecosystems—for example, in ad tech, we are in the middle of an ecosystem where we’re supporting users, publishers, advertisers. I want to engage constructively. We will make our case as how we have approached our work through the lens of being helpful to users and customers.”
And while Google’s size does make it a target for antitrust investigations, it also has prevented the company from becoming a big player in the M&A arena. Pichai says that Google can participate in mergers and acquisitions but only in areas where it is a smaller player. This is one area of the M&A market that Apple has cornered, buying smaller firms out of the country that are also under the radar. Often these companies have just one product or technology that Apple can employ in a year or two.
As for Google’s China-based business, always in the news since Huawei was banned from its U.S. supply chain, Pichai notes that while the company does have a presence in the country, it is not offering or planning on offering any of its core products in China.
