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Google Files for IPO
bobwyman manages to be the first to submit this story, apparently by using his own web service: "Well, the PubSub.com SEC Edgar notification system just sent a message a few minutes ago saying that Google has finally filed their S-1 to go public. See: Google's S-1 which was accepted by the SEC at 2004-04-29T13:53:49-04:00. If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing."
"In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent." - LISnews.com.
More stories are available from CNN and The Associated Press.
If you had had a Slashdot subscription, you would have been one of the first to see bobwyman's advertisement.
Google stock will go up, then down, then up, then become unpredictable. There, that ought to be vague enough.
w0000t! Does this mean they'll have the money for the moon base?
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The Google IPO has been so hyped that I think the shares will be priced so high at the beginning that they will have no place to go but down.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Now, off to mortgage my house and buy some stock. I just hope they maintain quality of service that they have been providing for so long.
hrrm.
How long after the stock goes public will the general population be able to purchase some? What's the game plan for these people - is Google worth the buy?
mix_master_mike
vafrous
"If you had had a PubSub.com SEC Edgar subscription, you would have been one of the first to see this filing." - was this advertisement strictly necessary?
This stock is going to fly straight up for the first few months.
Then it's going to tank.
Then everyone will buy it at $1 a share.
It'll repeat this cycle for a while before stabilizing. In the meantime expect Ads to start flooding google.com as they try to meet their new quarter numbers as expected by share holders.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right from the horse's mouth. There's already a crapload of articles. Of note, they're doing a Dutch Auction IPO and want to earn $2.7B, although speculation puts this closer to $20B. The underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
From the Introduction to the Letter from the Founders:
Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.
The coolest voice ever.
The initial option grants to many of our senior management and key employees are fully vested. Therefore, these employees may not have sufficient financial incentive to stay with us.
Many of our senior management personnel and other key employees have become, or will soon become, substantially vested in their initial stock option grants. While we often grant additional stock options to management personnel and other key employees after their hire dates to provide additional incentives to remain employed by us, their initial grants are usually much larger than follow-on grants. Employees may be more likely to leave us after their initial option grant fully vests, especially if the shares underlying the options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the option exercise price. We have not given any additional grants to Eric, Larry or Sergey. Larry and Sergey are fully vested, and only a small portion of Eric's stock is subject to future vesting.
Have you Meta Moderated t
... As if a million investors cried out in simultaneous orgasm,
1) An IPO is a huge distraction. I doubt, given the hype, they'll be able to stay focused on their competitors.
2) Their competitors are coming on strong. Y! is making gains in the space.
3) They could suffer from a huge brain drain. If the IPO is uber successful then a lot of folks will get very rich and leave.
That being said, I wouldn't mind having some $.25 fully-vested google options right about now...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
[...]
We face significant competition from Microsoft and Yahoo.
We face competition from other Internet companies, including web search providers, Internet advertising companies and destination web sites that may also bundle their services with Internet access.
Looks like they're going with the share auction plan. Seems like the SEC filing is buried, but the key details seem to be:
1) Underwriters manage the auction
2) You pre-qualify, etc.
3)You bid (and can multiple bid - ie, one bid for 9K shares at $20, another bid for 1K shares at $40, you'll get 10K shares if the price is $15)
4)The reject "manipulative" or "speculative" bids
5)They calculate a clearance price that'd sell all the shares offered according to the bids, and accept bids accordingly
6)They determine whether to hand out all the shares bid, give everyone 80% of what they asked for, give the bid/little guys everything they asked for, or let original bid price determine who gets everything they asked for.
I'd be really interested in what some professional equity people think of this process, it seems really interesting to me.
I hope Google keep to their game-plan that's made them the best, and richest search engine in the world. I hope shareholders don't start voting for popups on the main page, and lots of links to cheap holiday deals.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Yeah, because every company that has gone public has stopped innovative R&D and constant steady growth. Look at some of the major public companies out there (3M and General Electric) to see what R&D can really accomplish. Add in the fact that Google will gain at least $2 billion that they can use towards more services, current research, and increasing infrastructure. Your comment is baseless.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Although of course this was inevitable, it is somewhat disheartening. Google will become a company that is steered by stockholders. As everybody knows, most stockholders don't care about being not evil, or really anything other than profit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the guys who own Google currently like profit, but public companies are different. A stockholder wouldn't normally feel bad if the company they owned some fraction of used terabytes of user information for slightly shady practices. The only publicly held company I truly trust is Apple, and of course there's no logical reason for that.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
This, of course, has some Underwriters worried, given that a fee in the range of 5% could yeild over 100 million dollars for an IPO such as google.
Many believe, however, that this will not indicate a trend due to the fact that this may be easy for google, because they are allready a household name. In most other cases, an auction will not be so easy.
Top ten reasons not buy Google IPO
http://www.mozdex.com :)
:)
Search engine built on Open Source technologies and will never have to worry about coming too corporate.
Goal is to use an open api, open algorithm and disclose everything there is about search and search technologies. Will even be launching a blog shortly.
Well, this isn't about the Google IPO, but it is about an open source project with ambitions to play the game google does without all the corporate mumbo jumbo and no need to IPO.
Index is about 50 million pages during beta but we are about to roll out our 250 million page corpus.
Let us know what you think
In other news, Microsoft has put aside half its cash reserves to purchase 51% of these new shares. Mass suicides and hysteria begin.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
They will acquire Lycos.com now, of course.
Google CEO:
"Finally... after all these years Lycos and Hotbot will be mine. Muhahaha"
Middle-Management Grunt:
"Sir, the IPO has went through"
Google CEO:
"Ex-ce-llent... ready the fleet"
Most people don't know much about investing or even money in general.
More then a few outstanding ideas have died or at least not lived up to their potentials due to bad implementation, planning or management.
Myself I'm not convinced 1 that google is a long term financially sound company.
The IPO price will probaly be too high to justify what value they do have.
And most importantly. There are probaly more established companies with a history of performance that will offer a better return with less risk.
I hope they get a "GOO" ticker symbol.
Sweet precious GOO.
Speaking quite frankly here, if you don't have money you can piss away, don't bother with buying individual stocks.
Also, keep in mind that you have to pay a commission on purchase and on sale. So lets say you buy $500 worth of Google, and it goes up to $600. You pay $10.95/trade (Ameritrade, say). That's $78.10 profit. If you sold it within 18 months of buying it, you have to pay income taxes on that money, lets say that is 25%. That's $58.57 profit. (Actually, I don't remember if you can discount the commissions for tax purposes). That's around a 11% return. If you buy $1000, and it goes up to $1200, gives you $133 profit after the 25% taxes and commissions, a 13% gain. The more you invest, the less significant the commissions become.
If you insist, though, you don't have to spend all of the money in your brokerage account on stock. You can leave some in as cash. You probably won't earn interest on it, but since its only a few hundred dollars anyways, that shouldn't matter too much.
Btw, you may be interested in a service such as Sharebuilder. They can automatically debit a certain amount every month, and then buy fractional shares. It's like $12/month for the service, though.
Yeah, because every company that has gone public has stopped innovative R&D and constant steady growth. Look at some of the major public companies out there (3M and General Electric) to see what R&D can really accomplish. Add in the fact that Google will gain at least $2 billion that they can use towards more services, current research, and increasing infrastructure. Your comment is baseless
What I'm going to say I think is not much new, but here's a good place to say it. You're right, but I think what the original poster really had in mind was not necessarily innovation in terms of doing research. It was more along the lines of innovation in terms of risky undertakings paying off. Once a company goes public, you can't throw the basket of eggs at the wall and see what sticks anymore. You have to choose more dependable undertakings to convince your investors not to sell. While risky undertakings can lead to wildly successful innovations, there are plenty of less risky undertakings which I'm sure Google can handle. Google's future will look more dependable, which is good, because yes, they're a quality company.
I think those preaching "run out and spend all your money to buy Google stock because you'll get rich" need to sit back and think realistically for a few minutes.
The main thing to remember is: the 1990's are over. That was last decade, this is now. Over-inflated stock prices with P/E (Price to Earning) ratios that are ridiculous are mostly gone now. Sure, Google's stock will probably do ridiculously well for the first few months. However, if everyone thinks this, it will just be artificial inflation waiting to fall out as long-term investors realize that the stock price is way higher than it should be for their earnings. No matter how much some of us dislike Microsoft, would it make any sense for Google, whose earnings are only an inkling of Microsofts to have a stock price that soars far beyond Microsofts and through the roof to match the likes of what Intel and Amazon used to trade at (hundreds of dollars per share)?
Those are just a few of my thoughts. I plan on investing in Google but only as a long-term option, because I believe that they will do well in the long run, but that their stock price will be overly affected by "announcements" of new features etc. Their business model is fairly narrow (e-mail, search services / advertisements, price-searching etc...) and does not have many sources of revenue. Who knows, maybe they can get rich off the search boxes they sell to companies to use to search data on company networks?
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
News.com.com reports that you are wrong. To quote:
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority...
"In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to 'make their quarter.' In Warren Buffett's words, 'We won't smooth quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
The founders have also fought to maintain their control over the company even as it hired Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt in 2000. According to the document, Page and Brin said that they will run the company as a "triumvirate."
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Did anyone else find it interesting that Google's Proposed Maximum Aggregate Offering Price is equivalent to e*(10^9)? ($2,718,281,828) I think this is Google's way of telling us geeks that everything is going to be 'ok'.
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Here's the wsj article(for subscribers).
An interesting paragraph-
"According to the filing, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made $ 250,000 in salarly and got a $301,556 bonus last year, plus other compensation of $2,894. Co-founders Mr. Brin, now president of technology and Mr. Page, now president of products, both got salaries of $150,000 and bonuses of 206,556.".
And you can compare the pay with other US companies. Other companies can learn from google here.
For those worried that Google will become a wall street pawn, here's what the founders are doing about it-
"The offering documents were filed with a lengthy letter, called the "Owner's Manual" for the company. In it, co-founder Larry Page said he and co-founder Sergey Brin have worried that the "standard structure of public ownership may jeopardize the independence and focused objectivity that have been most important in Google's past success and that we consider most fundamental for its future."
As a result, the founders "have designed a corporate structure that will protect Google's ability to innovate and retain its most distinctive characteristics."
Part of that will be a dual-class structure, in which the founders will hold a higher-vote class of stock that will allow them to control much of the company's fate.".
Bottom line? Once you go public, wall street makes you ride to its tunes. Preventing that at google will establish it not only as the intelligent company but a financially astute one too.
Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available.
Any ideas what Google will do with the money it raises?
http://google-ipo.com/
That site has been around for a while, a unofficial google ipo watch.
Useful.
This will stop your worries
In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will maintain decision-making authority. Such structures have proven beneficial in media companies, such as The New York Times, the filing states.
So this mean Larry and Sergey will still drive Google and everyone knows how they work. I don't think they will just react how wall street wants them to react.
NASDAQ is already in a declining pattern, breaking most of its moving averages in a downward position. Google will have the privilege of IPO'ing into a general market selloff.
On the other hand, the IT industry is filled with companies sending jobs overseas, holding back costly initiatives, and downsizing their R&D departments, because they cost money and impact the bottom line. Further, companies absolutely make decisions on a yearly timescale when they have to report to the public. A 5-year project which will take $100 million off the bottom line each year before yielding dividends? Good luck selling that proposal.
Just FYI... I didn't see anyone post a link to Google's Press Release about their registration. Maybe I missed it, but there it is.
Microsoft will own the search market and yahoo and google will merge and form Yahoogle.
Regardless of how we think Google might change as a result of going public, I think we should at the very least all celebrate the facts that 1) A good tech company can survive, thrive, and even get investor funding in the post dot com bomb world and 2)the creators and employees of Google are finally getting their just rewards. Yeah, they're going to make a boatload of money and that, of itself, is a very cool thing.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"