lunes, diciembre 19, 2005

With AOL Deal, Google May Get to Go Public Again

Interesante el análisis de Battelle sobre la entrada de Google en AOL:

With AOL Deal, Google May Get to Go Public Again: "
Consider: AOL and Yahoo made hay when Google went public. Both owned substantial stakes in Google due to earlier traffic deals, and both cashed out major paydays after GOOG's IPO.

Consider also: The success of Ask Jeeves, from the time it tied its revenue fortunes to Google at around $5 a share (July 2002) to the point at which IAC purchased them at nearly six times that. Google did not own a piece of Ask, but given that Ask's fortunes rose as soon as it did a deal with Google, I bet it wished it has asked for some Ask back in 2002...

So now consider this: Google is not going to make the same mistake. Why invest $1 billion in AOL? Well, should AOL go public, Google stands to profit - a lot. The company knows that by guaranteeing its business to AOL for the foreseeable future, it has in essence guaranteed AOL's bottom line, providing a healthy earnings forecast for AOL and Wall St., should Time Warner decide to spin its erstwhile child back out as an independent public company.

Will AOL be taken public? My conversations with AOL execs lead me to believe the answer is yes, as long as the numbers look good. This Google deal takes care of that....and why would Google invest in a subsidiary of Time Warner, unless they were promised some kind of liquidity event? "

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