Google made a decision about its IPO

• Mar. 26, 2003

There has been much speculation over the past few years about Google offering and IPO to the general public. In fact, back in July 2001 there was speculation about an IPO that had investors excited. We explained then that it wasn't in Google's immediate future.

Since that time, every spring speculation has been growing as to when the Google IPO would happen. At a recent PC Forum conference Google president Sergey Brin announced there would in fact be no IPO in the near future. His reason? Laziness.

That's right - He complained that it's too much work to fill the necessary paperwork out to complete the IPO. Although he admits many people including his own staff would benefit from the IPO, there are no plans in place to complete the action.

Although his comments were taken in jest, there is still truth to his remarks about no IPO. He also said that too many people were engrossed in current events, and with tech stocks still not performing as well as they could be, they are concerned about whether an IPO would benefit the company.

Many analysts felt that a Google IPO would help improve the lackluster performance of tech stocks and bring them back to near the levels they were trading before the last big stock market crash. Personally, I think it would take more than a Google IPO to turn around the crumbling tech stock market. Too many investors got burned and lost millions of dollars on tech companies who had nothing to show for the inflated value of their stocks.

In fact, there are a number of tech companies under investigation for their part in perhaps inflating corporate profits to take advantage of higher stock prices, or other less than ethical means of inflating their company's perceived value. AOLs accounting practices are under investigation, and Askjeeves IPO is under investigation as well.

Based on the previous performance of tech stocks I don't blame Google management for delaying an IPO yet again. There's too many investors out that remember how badly they lost when the market collapsed and they blame a good part of that loss on tech stocks.

Yeah I think I'd wait a little too until attitudes towards high tech companies change too.

Rob Sullivan
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