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Does this imply that GOOG and GOOGL shares will have prices that will move independently going forward? This should be interesting to watch.
Yes, and Google has committed to pay an extra dividend if the prices diverge too much, because laws.
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Yes, and Google has committed to pay an extra dividend if the prices diverge too much, because laws.
OK my other comment got voted down - the potential extra dividend is not because of "laws" but because of a lawsuit settlement. http://googleclasscsettlement.com/
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People thought the same about YouTube, but that turned out to be a brilliant (and very profitable) move. Then again, they also thought the same about AOL/TimeWarner, and they were absolutely right then. It's usually pretty futile to try to predict the future. I can see Zuck's reasoning with the Whatsapp purchase, though, and I don't think he's insane. He and Larry probably understand the structure of the tech industr…
YT was bought for $1.65bn in shares which is an order of magnitude less.
This is meant do to one thing -- let the founders retain control while allowing for large stock acquisitions. It's possible Google was muscled out of the Whatsapp deal simply because they couldn't pony up the money. $20B is almost half of their cash on hand. Note that the Nest and Waze acquisitions (small in comparison) were paid for almost entirely in cash.
Google wouldn't have paid $20 billion for Whatsapp, and the only reason Facebook did is because their stock is very overvalued, and Zuckerberg knows that, so he's taking advantage of it while he can. Google's stock isn't that overvalued, if at all so they can't buy apps with $20 billion of what is basically "play money".
It's a perfectly logical outcome if you have high stock valuation and not as much cash on hand.
If you're in GOOG options, it's going to get goofy. http://www.cboeoptionshub.com/2014/03/28/goog-get-ready-next...
Also, if you have a "stop loss" orders then I think it is worth cancelling them. I'm not sure if they are smart enough to pick up on splits.
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OK my other comment got voted down - the potential extra dividend is not because of "laws" but because of a lawsuit settlement. http://googleclasscsettlement.com/
I agree it's because of the lawsuit, but usually people settle lawsuits because they think the law will rule against them.
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> and yet none of them make money except search advertising. I actually think lots of them make money -- over $5 billion in non-advertising revenue in 2013 [1]-- its just they are dwarfed by the scale of the revenue from search advertising ($50 billion in 2013.) > they haven't successfully SOLD anything to date. If they haven't sold anything but advertising, they must have just conjured that $5 billion in non-adverti…
91% of their business is advertising, 9% is other stuff including android apps, chromecast, chromebooks, fiber, app engine. The actual number is 4.927 billion for 2013[1]. They have not really had a successful product outside of advertising. Chromecast is probably the closest thing to a success out of all the other things they do. Seeing as how they don't have a single business line over a billion, I'd consider all o…
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This is nonsense. If they could have offered x billions in y shares, what change now? Will people accept offers for x billions in 2y shares? It makes zero sense!
The new shares issued here have stricly no voting rights. So they can offer them in any quantity without having to worry about diluting their voting rights. Whereas offering 19B in voting shares (even though I'd imagine class A shares have less rights than class B) might have been enough to dilute Brin and Page's voting rights significantly.
but then, wouldn't the non-controlling shares be deemed worthless in the long run and it's price plummet in comparison to the controlling shares?
Any other big company did that before?
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Google have been trying to find something apart from advertising since pretty much day dot. It's a strategy pioneered by Microsoft, I call it "spaghetti cannon". Turn your free cashflow into spaghetti, fire it at a wall, hope something sticks. It's sorta-kinda worked for MS. They have 4 or 5 distinct lines of business, each of which could qualify as an F500 alone. Google don't have that. They have 1, and only 1, line…
Google has multiple billion-dollar business lines. But mostly they have been effective in building products that drive revenue to the main one.
You are never really in the business of your expenses. A farm is not in the diesel and fertiliser business.
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Google has multiple billion-dollar business lines. But mostly they have been effective in building products that drive revenue to the main one.
They have multiple divisions. They have only one thing that people pay them for in any significant volume. You are never really in the business of your expenses. A farm is not in the diesel and fertiliser business.