Google Chooses An Underwriter For Upcoming IPO 300
PenguinSix writes "Bloomberg and a bunch of others are reporting that Google has hired Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to arrange its initial public offering. This follows literally years of rumors and stories about a Google IPO. About a third of Mountain View, California-based Google may be sold in the IPO, giving the company a market value of about $12 billion, the bankers said." Google has become so invaluable to many people (like me) that they could probably raise just as much money with a blackmail scheme.
Re:Suck. (Score:3, Informative)
I can't see how an IPO is good for the company. Good for the employees, but not good for the company.
It's a one-time huge infusion of cash into the company. That money can be used to purchase equipment and hire new employees. So there can be plenty of good for the company.
The bad news is that you have to sell your soul to get the money. As I mentioned above, you are no longer in complete control of your destiny. I'm worried what will happen to google. Did they really need the money that badly?
GMD
They're only selling 1/3 (Score:5, Informative)
The current owners will have absolute control, and won't have to follow the whims of anyone else.
Re:Google - "Pineapple-Upsidedown-Beans" (Score:2, Informative)
There are a lot of SEC type problems with that sort of scheme. Being practical, most investors are institutional, mutual funds, etc, not geeks that might buy 1 share. If you want, there are various services that will sell you 1 share, but it usually costs $25-$50 to have the share issued to you.
Regarding blackmail, how so?
Maybe timothy doesn't want the whole world to know what phrases/images he searches for at 3 AM?
Be Careful: Use Buy Limit Orders (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is going to get ugly. (Score:5, Informative)
Before somebody else does it
http://www.google-watch.org/
http://www.googl
The first is from an equally pissy person complaining about not being ranked where they would like to be, and the latter is somebody telling the first "tough shit".
The google-sucks.org person is in the same situation, and I must say that their "we have proof" (and subsequently not showing us that proof) hasn't instilled any level of trust in their story with me.
On blocking blogs - can you say "GoogleBomb", and even just the natural skewing of results thanks to blogs ? If I ran a search engine, I'd block them from the main results too. I would also check into a Blog-specific search. What's your problem with that ?
Spamvertising - Google added ads. So what ? Are they in-your-face ? Are they flash-based ? Are they obnoxius ? Are they difficult to recognize ? The answer to all is 'no', which you can't say for a whole lot of other search engines. Not to mention that I -have- actually clicked Google-served ads because the ads are dynamically loaded based on the referring page's content.
Manipulation of searches is blatant ? Well excuse me for liking that they manipulate search results to keep things, for the most part, fair. Maybe they have a hidden agenda - I wouldn't know. But if AssCorp decides to syndicate their store-content so that whenever I search for a particular product, I get 200 pages of different 'vendors' all serving up the exact same content and linking to eachother, then I 'm all for Google saying "Hey now - that shit looks a lot alike, maybe I'll bump down the ratings there some."
As for google toolbar 'spyware'. Whatever ?
This doesn't ship with some other application where you get tricked into it. You have to actually download it yourself. Then when you install, you get fully warned about what the Pagerank and the like options will do - send back information to Google. If you don't disagree with that, then either A. disable pagerank (and other features that cause information to be sent back) or B. don't install the Google toolbar.
As for what an IPO will do to Google - we honestly can't tell. Yes, it's easy to think that they'll cave in to demand from the public shares holders to allow rankings to be bought so that their shares go up. So what if that happens ? Is Google to blame for that - or the greedy public shares holders ruining things for the entire rest of the population ? Think about that for a minute.
Regardless.. there's other search engines. You don't like Google ? good for you - use a different one, and quit whining.
Re:They're only selling 1/3 (Score:2, Informative)
It won't happen immediately, but in time more than 50% of the company's stock will be available on the public markets. Go look at Yahoo [yahoo.com]. Look at the percentage held by insiders. The rest is available on the public market and you could buy it all, given enough time and money.
From the article (Score:4, Informative)
Net income $200 million = 1.7%
Net income $300 million = 2.5%
Not exceptional, there are companies with long histories with dividends above this.
You might get a better return from bonds.
Re:IPO: It's Probably Overpriced (Score:5, Informative)
Since the Google IPO is being done differently, there's no opportunity for insiders or anyone else to buy shares below fair market value -- buying IPO shares during the auction gives you about the same price you'd get on the open market 5 minutes after the auction ends. Therefore, nobody gets "free money" as is usually the case in IPOs. This allows Google to raise money more efficiently which, incidentally, is the point of holding an auction in the first place.
Time for alternatives (Score:2, Informative)
Re:say good bye (Score:3, Informative)
If are to lazy to look it's dubya's page
Re:Be Careful: Use Buy Limit Orders (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously things have changed since 1999 (or whenever this happened). But while I agree with you completely that a limit order is good for ensuring your exposure is limited, people may want to place that limit pretty high, depending on how desperate they are to buy in. And anyone who is risk-averse should of course stay far away, or at least wait to see how the wind blows.
12 billion??? (Score:1, Informative)
1000 employees...
12 million/head... nice
Google must IPO (Score:5, Informative)
They probably are not worrying about buying somebody either.
The reason they are going public is because SEC rules force companies with a certain number of owners to go public. The companies have to file all the costly paperwork as if they were a public company, and they lose most of the advantages of staying private, such as not releasing all that information about their activities. There is little reason to stay private, and the extra cash from the IPO is handy for paying for all that paperwork.
The famous case of this happening was Microsoft. Too many employees were exchanging shares privately, and the SEC forced them to go public. They did really well, and you cannot blame their decline on being a public company since the prior management is still running things. OTOH, because MSFT is public, the shareholders can insist on new management, but they will probably wait until the stock goes under $10, and that will be too late to save the company, if it isn't already.
Google is being forced into going public. There is no need to look for extra motives from their investors and management.