Co-founder of Google Inc. Larry Page will be taking over the post of chief executive officer, from Eric Schmidt, who is a witness of the transformation of a barely profitable startup with two hundred employees into the owner of the world's most- used search engine, having twenty nine billion dollars in sales last year.

Schmidt, who will take the post of the executive chairman, stated today that Larry is ready and it's is high time he had a shot at running this.

Schmidt, aged fifty five had joined the company in the year 2001. He will now look after deals, partnerships and customers, as written by him in a blog post. Page will be taking over regular operations on April 4. Schmidt steered the company past early doubts that it could build a successful ad business around a search engine. He also monitored the 2004 initial public offering, which was the biggest for any Internet company.

Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. in San Francisco stated that they view this as proof of all the founders staying engaged in the business which is a positive sign.

The company also gave its fourth-quarter profit that surpassed analysts' estimates as businesses enhanced spending for online advertising.

The Mountain View, California based firm Google, climbed up by 1.3 percent in late hours of trading to six hundred and thirty five dollars after closing at six hundred and twenty six dollars and seventy seven cents seen on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares declined by 4.2 percent in the last year.

Page, however does not have any experience of running a company as the CEO. He takes the charge of Google and its twenty four thousand employees as it faces accelerating rivalry from Facebook Inc., the world's biggest networking site, which has gathered more than half a billion users since its founding in 2004. Google is also faced with competition from mobile advertising from Apple Inc.