Question

About google.inc

What has happened to the company since the IPO in terms of marketing, production, and other operations?

Answer 1

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) Process is where a previously unlisted company sells new or existing securities and offers them to the public for the first time.Prior to an IPO, a company is considered to be private – with a smaller number of shareholders, limited to accredited investors (like angel investors/venture capitalists and high net worth individuals) and/or early investors (for instance, the founder, family, and friends).After an IPO, the issuing company becomes a publicly listed company on a recognized stock exchange. Thus, an IPO is also commonly known as “going public”.

An auction, at least in theory, should deliver the highest possible price for the company while giving individual investors, rather than just the fund managers who dominate the bookbuilding approach, the opportunity to buy shares. But by the time Google launched the IPO, it had scaled back the size of the stock sale and lowered the offering price in the face of weak demand. After setting a price range of $108-135 per share, Google went public at only $85 per share, selling just 22.5 million shares and raising just $1.9 billion. Adding insult to injury, the stock rose 18 percent on the first day of trading to close at $100.34 -- suggesting that the auction failed to achieve its purpose of setting a price as close as possible to the value investors would award the stock on the open market. The IPO was largely viewed as a fiasco.

Part of the reason that the offering raised less money than expected was simply bad luck: In the weeks leading up to the IPO, both the technology-laden Nasdaq market and shares of Yahoo YHOO +0%, Google’s top rival at the time, had been drifting downwards, sending a chill through the IPO market.

Two other factors, however, were even more important. The first factor was that the “road show” did not go well. When a company goes public, in an attempt to stimulate demand, the top managers and the investment bankers hired to take the company public typically spend up to two weeks going from city to city making presentations to institutional investors and answering questions. Google’s management, however, refused to answer many of the questions that were asked. As a result, investors were less willing than normal to give the company the benefit of the doubt about its future profitability.

The second factor that lowered the offer price was the desire of the lead underwriters, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley MS +0%, to sabotage the auction. Underwriters find the bookbuilding system to be very profitable, and most feel threatened by auctions. With an auction, the underwriters no longer have the power to allocate underpriced shares to their favorite customers. Consequently, the lead underwriters didn’t want the auction to be viewed as a success. They didn’t want it to be a complete failure, however, since they were the lead underwriters. The underwriters told many institutional investors that they were likely to receive shares if they bid $85 per share. Not surprisingly, there were a huge number of bids for shares at $85, and relatively little demand at a higher offer price. Google was forced to accept just $85 per share.

Google and the selling shareholders thus raised less money than they could have in the IPO. But the offer was selling only 8% of the company, and the employees and others who held their shares were amply rewarded as the stock rose, and rose further, as profits increased from $286 million per year to $13 billion per year. Google has proven that targeted search advertising can be an enormously profitable business, which is why Facebook was able to get a valuation of $104 billion when it went public in 2012.