08 October 2009 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Google CEO announces that economy is recovering

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has announced that the worst of the advertising recession has now passed, and has confirmed that the company is hiring more staff and increasing investment as the economy begins to recover.

Google CEO announces that economy is recovering

Speaking at a press conference in New York, Mr Schmidt stated that "the worst is behind us," and expressed his surprise that the European market in particular is recovering faster than anticipated.

Peter Kafka of All Things Digital transcribed Mr Schmidt's opening address:

"We are clearly seeing aspects of recovery, and what is notable is that we're seeing aspects of recovery not just in the United States but in Europe. I had been in error in assuming that there would be a lag, that it would the U.S. first and Europe second. Asia, of course, was never significantly hit in the first place.

"So that means from a Google perspective that...we never stopped hiring, but we told our team internally and again, we've said to many other people that we are increasing our hiring rate and our investment rate in anticipation of a recovery."

The hour-long conference saw Google executives answering questions about many aspects of the company's recent history and future plans, including the recent Gmail outages. Google co-founder Sergey Brin explained that the company is working to improve its response time to such issues in the future, but also stated that Google's cloud-hosted email service is less prone to failure than those of some competitors.

Mr Schmidt is also remaining optimistic about Google's investments, which are still anticipated at a rate of one per month, though mostly in the form of minor takeovers. On the subject of more expensive acquisitions in the company's recent history, Mr Schmidt stated: "I think that DoubleClickand YouTubewill be two of our best acquisitions. DoubleClick is already close to paying back, and YouTube will get there soon."