Alphabet’s acquisition strategy has focused on cloud, says CFO Ruth Porat

Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said the Google parent company’s deals strategy is largely focused on cloud companies.

“The acquisitions that we’ve talked about really in particular fill in holes in cloud and that’s been really valuable,” Porat told Kara Swisher at the Code Conference at the Terranea Resort in California.

She declined to state what companies might be on the table.

She acknowledged the company has “a small pile of cash,” presumably referring to the the roughly $47 billion the company could bring back to the United States if a temporary tax break passes.

“If we’re not investing now, we’re going to rue the day that we didn’t,” she said about Google’s opportunity with cloud at a separate point in the interview.

We can assume any acquired cloud company would become a part of Alphabet subsidiary Google, rather than becoming its own subsidiary. Google ranks third among cloud providers, behind Amazon and Microsoft, and if it wants to catch up quickly it’s going to need to shop for cloud companies that can deliver sizable customer bases.

Here’s an excerpt from what she said:

“The main thing that we’ve said is that the primary use for that [pile of cash] is organic growth and acquisition growth. We look at acquisitions all the time. We’ve done some really important ones for us — YouTube and DoubleClick and others came to us through acquisition. But we have a high bar. The acquisitions that we’ve talked about really in particular fill in holes in cloud and that’s been really valuable.”

Watch the full interview at Recode’s Code Conference below.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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