Anyone who figured that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) would go through a series of small acquisitions as appetizer courses before digging into a meatier entree may want to head back to the tapas bar.
BusinessInsider has unearthed several intriguing job openings at the world's largest search engine, suggesting that Google may want to play with its own cash reserves, instead of going on a shopping spree.
Job openings at Google's finance arm include foreign-government bond trader, government bond analyst, and mortgage-backed securities analyst positions. Big G is also hiring a portfolio manager to handle external money managers.
Google closed out the year with $24.5 billion in cash and short-term securities. With idle cash earning a pittance in interest, it's only natural for the dot-com darling to want more bang for its passive buck. Venturing deeper into the yield curve and into foreign markets with richer payouts demands professional expertise, but it will also likely tie up more of Google's money in longer-term investments.
This certainly won't preclude Google from more of the bite-sized buys it has gobbled down lately. As regulators grow weary of Big G's girth, its shopaholic days may be rapidly winding down anyway. True, it has more cash in the bank than the enterprise value of Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), AOL (NYSE: AOL), and Ask.com parent IAC (Nasdaq: IACI) combined, but I doubt antitrust regulators would allow that sort of monstro-merger to happen. Google now occupies the same restrictive cage as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), drawing scrutiny with every purchase.
The more tantalizing possibility is that inviting bond-based bean counters to mingle with its engineers may eventually result in a bond-trading platform. As a data-devouring juggernaut, it's entirely feasible for Google -- in a few years -- to offer up electronic bond and stock trading platforms. NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) went public as a result of hooking up with the fast-growing electronic Archipelago platform a couple of years ago, so let's not dismiss the raw power of Google's farm of servers and its appetite for data. However, if that were the case, wouldn't it be better off making one last modest-sized purchase by snapping up eSpeed parent BGC Partners (Nasdaq: BGCP)?
Hopefully, Google will shed a little more light on its craving for bond traders, analysts, and money managers at its next quarterly conference call. Who knows? It may even have already hired some of the analysts on the other end of the line at that point.
What do you think is behind Google's bond ambitions? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
