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Google Goes Public at $85/share
adpowers writes "It is official. Google will have its IPO debut at $85 per share. To quote the article, 'At that price, the low end of its recently revised range, Google raised $1.67 billion, with $1.2 billion to go to the No. 1 Internet search engine and $473 million to Google executives and investors selling their shares.' Trading begins Thursday, August 19th." Got Google?
So anticlimactic. I am actually disinfranchised by the whole ordeal. At least the price came down a bit from the overinflated suggested ipo.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Google is valued at around $23B. Even though it is lower than recent estimates, it is still much higher than people were originally speculating: $10-15B.
Sometimes the media overanalyzes. If you read last night's article in the New York Times, barely anyone mentions that the simple reason the expected share price dropped is that: people did not understand/were confused by the auction process.
I think that's about it. Nothing very complicated at all...
If the only reason the price went down was confusion, then today when the stock is listed and can be bought by "normal" means, then it will shoot right up to $135, right?
While I think hyping ones own company is important (and required in this day and age) I believe that Google was elevated to a high status (both by themselves and the community) to such a point as to make them seem "saintly" (for lack of better words). :)
The initial estimates of their price created such hype and talk -finally it deflated, by a good amount (IIRC the initial estimates were up to 120 per share?).
I remember reading the articles last year, prior to Google going IPO - saying how important this would be to our economy - how Google would save the stock market with all the trading fee revenue, etc... And then came the articles that Google doesn't want to IPO - they want to remain "pure" and "uncompromised" by not having a board of directors and shareholders who would force them to become "evil." In the end, it was a great marketing strategy - playing "hard to get."
If anything, the whole ordeal tired me out and now that the time came, I feel more blah then what I should. Hmm maybe it is because its a "blah" morning for me - but I expected something more cool when I hit Google website - anything - throw the comman person (who won't spend 85/share) a bone
Those are my feelings - I do not expect many people to agree with me - but then, that is why these are feelings (opinions).
Thanks for listening
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
You may be lost without it, but what revenue do they actually generate based on that? Do you click on their ads? That's great, but then where do they go from there?
Mind you, I think Google is a great tool, but they've bungled this IPO pretty badly. Whether they can continue to innovate and grow as a company is an open question that will be interesting to follow over the next few years...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
It's funny how many people actually assume that 51% of the shares in a company are *available*. Just because you want to buy, doesn't mean the other guys want to sell.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
mod me down, goggle fanboys, but I'm not buying into the hype. I haven't heard anything about how they're going to turn a big bundle of cash into an even bigger bundle for a return on my investment, other than piss it away one advertising experiments. It's basically Internet data-mining of public information anyway.
Give me a good solid energy or pharmaceutical company or something with a steep demand curve, naturally limited supply and customers who gotta have it (like sickly suv owners).
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
competing with Microsoft has historically been a bad move
This is a bit of a meme, and I believe and incorrect one.
Sure, when the PC market was rising Microsoft did really well agressively bagging the OS and Office application markets.
However, it's not been very good moving into established markets, and for a while hasn't even been very good at bagging new, rising markets.
They said they would kill AOL. They didn't even get close. They said they would dominate the software for mobiles market. They haven't. They said they would beat Sony in the game console market, but they haven't.
Once upon a time, everyone in the industry feared Microsoft. Those days are over.
I know a company that when call volume is low they simply up their cost per click on Google for a couple of hours, spending about $1000, and they have work for the next month. Google ads really work.
For my business, we landed a small contract for some communication line installations from posting an ad on Google. We spent about $60, and received just under $500 in billable services. We are currently working on an ad campaign for Google for some custom software. We will be making Google our only advertisement medium.
Click here or here.
>I do not see how a share can be fairly priced ...
>why the SEC allows this practice?
I assume that this is the heart of the question.
The purpose of SEC is not to determine if a share of a company is fairly priced or not. Thats your job.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Thursday?
Jonny, tell him what hes won....