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Posted
May 05 2008, 06:21 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Pegging Yahoo!'s potential financial exposure from shareholder lawsuits after it turned down an offer of about $33 from Microsoft is hard. It starts with the difference between the offer and where the stock falls after the rejection. That price could be $22 or lower. Investors would have lost $12 billion, and perhaps more.
Yahoo! is lucky, if one can call it that. Proving damages beyond the actual financial set-back to shareholders will be hard. Investors were not "damaged" as much as they simply lost money.
The other factor to Yahoo!'s advantage is that some groups of stockholders may not sue it at all. That would include the company's founders. Along with some large shareholder who supported the company walking away, probably 20% of the stock is in hands of people who would take no action. But, large class actions suits, especially if they are making progress, could be joined by that majority of the stockholder base who held shares three months ago as well as when the offer was rejected.
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Posted
May 05 2008, 06:15 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Google rules the search world in all but one important country. China not only has the largest population in the world, it has the largest number of people online totaling 221 million users. It passed the US last month for total number of internet citizens. At some point China could have 500 million people on the worldwide web, more than double the US.
Google's share of the search market in China is only 25%. Local search engine Baidu has 60%.
Baidu is a very small company when put along side Google. Revenue at the Chinese company many hit $200 million this year. Operating income might be $60 million. Google's revenue will be well over $20 billion this year. Operating income should be almost $10 billion. Still, Google can't make progress in China.
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Posted
Apr 22 2008, 04:43 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Once a year, the firm Millard Brown puts out its BrandZ 100 Most Valuable Brands. The data used for the list come from consumer research and financial data on the companies. The research house gives its methodology here.
For those who think Google is the top brand, give yourself a pat on the back. It has a brand valuation of $86 billion, up 30%. For those research mavens in the crowd, the figure makes absolutely no sense. Google has a market cap of $168 billion. Most of that would go away -- no matter how good the technology is -- if it changed it name to Dawdle.
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Posted
Apr 21 2008, 12:10 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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Looks like eBay is dusting off the "for sale" sign for Skype, and it's about time. The Internet calling division said today it's offering almost-unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada for $3 a month. (Calls to other countries will be $10 a month; click here for more info). I say almost because there's a 10,000 minute-per-month limit, which is more than five hours of calling a day.
Ebay has Skype under the microscope because it still hasn't figured out what to do with the company after buying it for $2.6 billion in 2005. Skype is a superstar on its own, with 309 million users and sales likely to hit $500 million this year. But meshing it with auctions? Hasn't worked. CEO John Donahoe said eBay will be testing Skype's "synergies" this year. But if the company hasn't found synergies in three years, why would it magically happen now?
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Posted
Apr 18 2008, 01:43 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Apple once again topped BusinessWeek's annual list of the 50 most innovative companies. And it's hard to argue with that call, what with the iPhone and the MacBook Air debuting in the last year. But I think Google is on pace to beat Apple when it comes to innovation, with its emphasis on creativity and pet products and its entry into markets like renewable energy and telecommunications. Let's see Apple top that this next year. Google is #2 on the list. Here's the rest of the top 10:
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Posted
Apr 18 2008, 01:12 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Google shares soared today after its first-quarter earnings report, and the company has comScore to thank for much of its good fortunes. That's because many analysts had lowered their revenue and profit estimates for the quarter after comScore's tracking data suggested paid-click growth was trending flat to down. The result? Google had the luxury of reporting earnings against diminished expectations. And it blew those expectations away. First quarter profit was $4.84 per share, way ahead of Wall Street's forecast of $4.53. Net revenue was $3.7 billion, ahead of the $3.61 billion analysts had forecast. How nice to have someone lower the bar so much that Google could just hop right over it and see its shares rise by 20%.
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Posted
Apr 17 2008, 11:32 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Hell hath no fury like investors who believed a data source that turned out to be wrong.
Just ask comScore, the Internet trafffic tracking company that suggested that growth in Google's domestic paid clicks were slowing. Lots of investors interpreted that to mean that Google's profit growth would slow (unless Google was collecting more money for each click). And that was one reason why, over the past eight weeks or so, Google's stock struggled.
Well, after Thursday's market close, Google said that its profits soared in the first quarter, and the stock jumped 17% to $525.96 in after-hours trading. And it appears that the Internet search giant was, in fact, getting more money for each click
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Posted
Apr 17 2008, 03:28 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Google shareholders had to be thrilled by the stock market's reaction to the company's first-quarter earnings report on Thursday afternoon.
And nobody could have been happier than Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Each saw the value of his stake jump about $2.2 billion in less than an hour as the stock jumped 17% to $526.50.
The stock took off after the company beat Wall Street estimates on revenue, net income and earnings per share for the first quarter and crushed just about all concerns that Google's business might be peaking.
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Posted
Apr 16 2008, 04:57 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
I'm not making this up. Apple's market capitalization is bigger than Citigroup's. The actual numbers at today's close were $135 billion for Apple and $123 billion for Citigroup.
This fact, which came courtesy of Barry Ritholtz's blog The Big Picture, struck me as, well, preposterous. Check these most basic of comparisons:
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Posted
Apr 11 2008, 12:09 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
My, how things can change in a week. Last Friday, Microsoft was putting the screws to Yahoo, telling Reuters it was "evaluating" its $31-a-share bid for the company because Yahoo has dropped in value. This week, a furious round of wheeling and dealing has given Yahoo the edge. I have to hand it to CEO Jerry Yang. His flirtation with AOL and Google is putting incredible pressure on Microsoft to raise its offer. The market seems to like where all this is headed: Yahoo shares are
up slightly from where they started the week and closed today at $28.34. The Street seems to think a Microsoft acquisition is still the most likely scenario, and Yahoo shares are up because of a general belief that Yang can extract more money out of the deal. And while things today may appear murkier than ever, this corporate drama seems to be careening (wildly, perhaps) to some sort of closure, possibly in the next week.
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