Exclusive Interview With Google's Eric Schmidt

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo sat down with Google

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[GOOG  Loading...      ()   ] CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt Tuesday at the Milken Conference in Los Angeles to discuss Google's growth and U.S. slowdown, the possibility of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo!, online advertising growth rates, Google's European stronghold and Google's stock, and other topics.

Here is the full, unaltered transcript of that interview:

Maria Bartiromo, host: Eric, thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO: Thank you for having me on again.

Bartiromo: Let's begin with this debate that seems to be brewing on Wall
Street about growth. So the company grew 46 percent in the third quarter, 40
percent in the fourth quarter, 30 percent in the next quarter, and then
sequentially 1 1/2 percent when you look quarter to quarter. How insulated
would you say is Google to the economic slowdown or recession?

AP

Schmidt: Well, the numbers you're using are year over year, quarter over quarter in the US. Globally, of course, we had good growth, and the US numbers are masked by the fact that, a year ago, we had a very strong quarterly growth of that quarter. So the real growth rate in the US is good,
although overall growth rates are slowing, as they have for years. Just because of the scale and size of what we operate. The business has continued to be good.

Bartiromo: OK, because when you get to a certain size, it's really hard to
sort of grind down more market share when you've already got 70 percent or get
that much bigger, given the fact that the company is getting--you're a large
business.

Schmidt: But we have--we have multiple ways in which we grow. Of
course, more people use the Internet, more people are using electronic
commerce on the Internet, more people are clicking on the ads, and also our ad
technology is getting much, much better. And it's really any one of those
will push us over the top in any given quarter; sometimes they all come
together. We don't seem to be very sensitive to macroeconomics, at least
right now. We don't seem to be very sensitive to things like recession. But
we're very sensitive to how quickly do we bring in the new product improvement
or something like that.

Bartiromo: The comScore data took everybody's estimates down, and this whole
debate about whether it was accurate or not. How can you ensure that the
growth occurs, even if people pull in their spending, if perhaps advertisers
slow down on the budgets? I mean, is it fair to say that the hypergrowth of
2004 to '07 is--has been seen?

Schmidt: Well, as I said, if you think about it over a five- or six- or
seven-year period, growth rates are slowing, as they have to. So I don't
think it's a big shift. It's not, you know, today it was one way and tomorrow
it's another. In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple
model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more.
So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and
we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of
Google.

Bartiromo: Yes, that's what Mary Meeker was saying. She's saying, `Look, it
could be that they're actually benefiting from a recession because they're
monetizing the ads better.'

Schmidt: There's been--you you know, if you were running a business
today, you would be looking very carefully at where is your marketing spend
going? And we think that you'll choose to put your marketing spend on the
thing that's most measurable, the thing that's most, you know--because you can
always defer a branding campaign that may or may not work, but you want to get
those customers and those leads right now, and that's what we do.