At $280 Google is valued at $78 Billion. That’s 50% more than the combined value of all the publicly traded newspaper groups in the US combined. Analysts seem to be happy with this, though, with CSFB forecasting a share price of $350 which would be nearly 75 times projected earnings for this year. Any of this seem familiar? People I speak to (I mean people who are supposed to know what they’re talking about) say this is all cool because Google has so much room for growth in its core business (advertising) and lots of new, as-yet-unimagined businesses lined up ready for launch. It gives me sweaty palms, though. (figures from Breaking Views, by the way).
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.
Yeah – it’s quite amazing isn’t it? I read in the Independent Media Section yesterday that Google have the combined wealth of Disney and some other massive multi-conglomerate which escapes me right now. Staggering.
Actually it’s not $78b. There are only 171,218,000 outstanding shares. At $280 a piece (currently $295.71) the market value of the company is worth $47.94b. And at $350 it would be 52-53 times earnings. Which would put it on par with Yahoo (just about).