Google tucked a surprise into its earnings announcement on Thursday when it said farewell to sales chief Nikesh Arora, who has driven the company’s stellar advertising growth in recent years.
Arora, who joined Google in 2004 and was its highest paid executive last year, is leaving the search engine to join Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank, Google told investors.
Arora — who had Ashton Kutcher at his lavish wedding in Puglia, Italy, earlier this month — will be replaced by Omid Kordestani, an adviser to Larry Page who is often dubbed Google’s “business founder.”
Kordestani stepped down from day-to-day operations in 2009 when he handed over the reigns to Arora, who then took over as Google’s chief business officer in 2011.
Investors seemed to brush off the transition, however, and pushed up the stock in after-hours trading more than 1 percent.
Google shares closed on Thursday down 1.5 percent, to $573.73 cents.
Wall Street focused instead on Google sales numbers, which exceeded expectations — a relief following last quarter’s disappointing sales growth as declining ad prices offset high demand.
For the period ended in June, Google reported gross revenue of $16 billion, up 22 percent over last year and above Wall Street’s expectations for $15.61 billion in sales.
Earnings, excluding stock-based compensation and other expenses, came in lower than expected, however, at $6.08 a share. Profits in the quarter ended in June were above last year’s earnings of $4.96, but below expectations of $6.25 a share.
Google said the average costs per click in the second quarter continued to experience declines as mobile ads become a larger part of its business.
But the decrease of 6 percent was less than last quarter’s decline of 9 percent in average costs per click.