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| Wednesday, August 18, 2004 |
| i've been excited and waiting for this... |
I Love Google!
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Initial shares of Google Inc. were priced late Wednesday at $85, the low end of a range revised downward just hours earlier, humbling expectations for the most ballyhooed Internet company public stock offering since the dot-com boom went bust.
Still, the offering remains one of the biggest and most highly anticipated for an Internet business, surpassing most of the hot tech issues of the 1990s. It will make billionaires — at least on paper — of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who started Google six years ago.
The final initial public offering price, set through an unorthodox auction that alienated many on Wall Street, means the stock will likely debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Thursday. The $85 price values the world's most popular search engine at $23.1 billion, more valuable than companies such as Amazon.com Inc., with a market cap of $16 billion and Lucent Technologies Inc., valued at $13.5 billion.
The IPO raised $1.67 billion.
Earlier Wednesday, Google significantly lowered its estimated per-share price range to between $85 and $95, down from the previous range of $108 to $135. In a move that should buoy prices, it reduced the number of shares to be sold to 19.6 million from 25.7 million.
If the stock had debuted at the high end of the original estimate, it would have raised as much as $3.6 billion and given Google a market cap as high as $36 billion.
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posted by maldita @ 11:14 PM
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