Semapa paga 148 milhões pela Imedexa na primeira compra fora do país

[Alfred E. Neuman]

By Steve Gelsi & Emily Church, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 8:00 AM ET Aug. 18, 2004

LONDON (CBS.MW) -- Internet search engine Google Wednesday slashed its IPO launch price to an expected range of $85-$95 per share, down from its earlier proposed $108-$135 per share range.

Google (GOOG: news, chart, profile) also cut the size of the deal to 19.6 million shares, down from 25.7 million and said its pre-IPO investors will sell fewer shares in the public offering.

Even at its reduced price, the IPO is expected to be the largest ever for an Internet stock, and is expected to raise $1.8 billion at the mid-point of the latest price range.

Google said early Wednesday that it has asked SEC to declare the registration statement effective on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2004 at 4:00 p.m. EST, a day later than planned.

Expectations had been mounting that Google would cut its IPO price range. See story

Google ran into trouble with its unusual Dutch auction system, regulatory probes into its quiet period and options disclosure issues, and an overall lackadaisical stock market.

The price downgrade and smaller shares allotment "is reflective of the weakness of the tech market right now, even if you are doing something as well modeled as (Google)," said Anais Faraj, a market analyst at Nomura Securities in London.

"The Nasdaq looks like a very sick beast. We've had a year and a half of a tech rally and it broke about a quarter ago. Even the Google-ite retail investors are thinking twice about buying tech stocks with these valuations," he said.

In a statement on its Web site overnight, Google said it expects to sell 14.14 million shares in the offering as originally filed, but that the selling shareholders are reducing the shares they expect to dispose of to approximately 5.5 million shares "in view of this new price range."

The change represents a decrease of 6.1 million shares. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will now sell nearly 500,000 shares each, down from about 1 million each.

CEO Eric Schmidt will sell 369,000 shares, down from 738,000.

Venture firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital trimmed their share of the IPO to zero, from about 2 million shares each.

The search engine serves around 200 million requests for information a day. On Monday, a filing revealed the SEC is informally probing option grants to employees. See full story.

Asks for SEC OK on Wednesday

Investors will be watching the stock closely when it begins open-market trading on the Nasdaq, which could come as soon as Thursday.

Throughout the run-up to the offering, Google warned investors that the price would be unlikely to jump after the stock-market debut, as was the case with virtually every hot IPO during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

"Buyers should not expect to be able to sell their shares for a profit shortly after our Class A common stock begins trading," Google wrote in its IPO filing.

Bidding began Friday and closed late Tuesday, marking the latter stages of the experimental Dutch auction, which was meant to give individual investors a fairer chance at purchasing shares. See full story.

With an estimated market capitalization of around $30 billion, Google will rival fellow search icon Yahoo (YHOO: news, chart, profile) and approach the $45 billion value the market places on auctioneer eBay (EBAY: news, chart, profile) and double the market cap of e-tail pioneer Amazon.com (AMZN: news, chart, profile).

Yahoo's market cap was about $334 million when it went public in 1996, but the stock jumped 154 percent in its first day -- a publicity-boosting development that was as common among bubble-era Net IPOs as it was maligned by investor watchdogs.

Even at its reduced size, the IPO may create Silicon Valley's biggest recent payoff for employees. See full story.