Google lost yet more of its shine on Tuesday after a senior executive at the internet search giant admitted growth at the company was slowing.
Shares in Google fell 13% in early trading on Wall Street and dragged stock markets lower on both sides of the Atlantic after chief financial officer George Reyes told an investor conference in New York that ”growth will slow”, although he added, ”Will it be precipitous? I doubt it.”
”We are getting to the point where the law of large numbers starts to take root,” he told delegates at a conference organised by investment bank Merrill Lynch.
His comments compounded market fears that Google’s previously stellar growth prospects are compromised. Google’s shares, which have already lost over 15% of their value this year, recovered some of their early losses by the afternoon when they were down 5,5% at $369,24. Google’s stock had risen rapidly since it floated at $85 a share in August 2004 but signs of waning faith in the business emerged in January when its latest quarterly results statement missed some analysts’ forecasts.
Reyes said Google must find other ways to ”monetise” its business because growth in the company was now largely dependent on improvements in the online advertising market. Google generates 99% of its revenues from internet advertising and is seeking other revenue sources. Using the massive financial muscle it built up through its flotation, Google has developed and launched an array of new business ventures.
Alongside the more esoteric, such as Google Earth, which in effect puts the functionality of a spy satellite into the hands of anyone with an internet connection, the company has been moving more into services that keep users returning to its site. The idea is to drive traffic back to Google’s main revenue earner: paid-for searches. It has launched an e-mail service, Gmail, and an instant messenger-cum-internet-telephony service called GoogleTalk, which it hopes will improve the ”stickiness” of its portal.
Google has been developing more niche search products such as Google Scholar, aimed at academia, and Google Books, designed to give publishers another route to market while putting the full text of out-of-copyright books on the web.
But revenues from these new services are still very small and with $6-billion in the bank there has been intense speculation that the company will buy itself future growth through acquisitions. It has already made several, including photo software company Picasas.
Tim Biggams, chief options strategist at stockbroker Man Securities, said any negative comments on growth prospects from the management was bound to damage the stock. ”Any time you get a stock valuation based on future growth prospects, and those growth prospects, as is the case with Google, are tempered, you are going to see this sort of negative reaction in the marketplace,” he said.
Two months ago Google nearly doubled fourth-quarter profits to $372-million but missed analysts’ targets, blaming a higher tax rate and weak advertising in some markets over Christmas. Google does not issue guidance to financial analysts, a policy that has taken some of the blame for the volatile share performance recently. Market jitters were exacerbated in February when Barron’s, the business magazine, warned that Google’s share price could halve this year in the face of competition from Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Backstory
- Stanford computer science graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 with an initial investment of $1-million. It went from eight staff in 1999 to 60 by 2000 when it officially became the world’s largest search engine with a billion-page index. By the end of 2001, when many dotcoms were in financial freefall, it had reached a profit.
- Google floated in August last year. It had nearly 5 000 staff and had branched into new areas with the Gmail and Google Print services. Its status was underlined three months ago when it bought a 5% stake in AOL for $1bn.
– Guardian Unlimited Â