Google ploughs money into Brazil
Google has made an unprecedented amount of investment in Brazil over the last 15 months and is looking to foster continued local growth.
The company has made an investment of 700 million reais ($189 million) in Brazil over the period, more than it had made in the three years between 2013 and 2016, when it invested 500 million reais ($135 million) in the country.
Key projects the investment has gone towards are the three undersea cables in Brazil the company is involved with, as well as an increase of a datacenter for local provision of cloud computing services and a Rio de Janeiro-based studio for content production for YouTube.
The numbers were disclosed by Google Brazil head Fábio Coelho in an interview to Brazilian newspaper Valor Econômico, who stated that the company will keep on investing significantly in Brazil, with 125 million reais ($33 million) of yearly investment planned for the foreseeable future.
In addition, the company will donate, through Google.org, 3 million reais ($810,000) to Instituto Rede Mulher Empreendedora, a local not-for-profit body focused on supporting female entrepreneurs. The investment will be used to train 135,000 women across Brazil in the next two years in Google tools that could be useful in setting up their new ventures.
Google does not disclose specific numbers regarding its financials but in true business speak, Coelho told Valor the performance in Brazil saw "healthy double-digit growth" last year, where "the first digit was not 1 nor 2" - so that could mean anything between 30 and 99 percent growth.