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Google splurges $1.5bn on acquisitions in nine months

Not including the $12.5bn it'll spunk on Motorola

Google has managed to spend around $1.5bn on acquisitions in the last nine months, including $265m in the month of September alone, according to a regulatory filing.

The official form for its quarterly earnings for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also detailed that the Chocolate Factory had splurged $151m on restaurant review guide Zagat and $114m on the German Groupon-clone Daily Deals.

The spends were just two of 56 "acquisitions and purchases of intangible assets" the web giant made in the nine months to the end of September, although the other 54 "were not material individually or in aggregate".

The company also bought ITA, the flight information software company, in the last nine months, which according to its fact sheet on the acquisition cost $700m, although the figure is not included in the filing.

The total value the internet behemoth ascribes to patents and developed technology it got from all its acquisitions is $407m.

Taking out those patents from ITA, Zagat and Daily Deals leaves $236m ascribed to "other", which presumably includes the value of the 2,053 patents it acquired from IBM in two deals over the period. A Google spokesperson had not returned a request for comment on this at the time of publication.

Of course none of these hefty outgoings include the promise of $12.5bn in cash for Motorola Mobility that Google entered into in August, a merger that the company expects to close by the end of this year or early next, subject to approvals.

However, in case you might be getting worried about the poor old monolith's cash-flow, you needn't, since the same filing also shows it is looking pretty good on that front. Google lists $4.2bn in readies sitting in the bank and $6.4bn in cash equivalents (government bonds, securities and the like), not to mention a cool $42.6bn in marketable securities (securities that can generally be converted into cash quickly at a reasonable price). ®

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