Google to buy Looker for $2.6 billion

New Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it would buy Looker, a big-data analytics company, for $2.6 billion in cash, in the first major acquisition for new Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian.

The deal builds on an existing partnership where the two companies share more than 350 customers, including BuzzFeed, Hearst and Yahoo, Google said https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/0606 in a statement.

Looker provides a visualization tool that helps customers spot trends and draw other lessons from their data. It competes with tools such as Tableau and Microsoft Corp’s Power BI.

“This is a true built-for-cloud visualization tool, and it signals Google Cloud is serious about making acquisitions,” said Ray Wang, a cloud industry analyst at Constellation Research.

Alphabet shares were down 0.6 per cent in early trading. Meanwhile, a leading German jobs portal hit out on Thursday at Google’s launch of its own job-search product in Europe’s largest economy, saying the US company had abused its dominant position to grab an overnight market lead.

Stepstone, owned by publisher Axel Springer, said the number of inquiries it was receiving via the world’s leading search engine had declined since Google for Jobs went live in late May.

The potential hit to Springer’s jobs arm, which accounted for more than a quarter of first-quarter core profits, threatens its strategy of growing its digital classifieds business to offset weakness in its legacy media titles.

The Berlin publisher is also currently holding talks with US private equity investor KKR with an option to take the company private under discussion.

Reuters