Google’s standard rule of not telling anybody anything until its too late has caused worldwide speculation as to what on Earth they plan to do with all that new money. A recent New York invitation-only meeting with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin did little to change that silent trend.
In fact, the information coming out of that meeting isn’t exactly flowing, leading some to speculation that Schmidt and Brin exercised some version of the Jedi mind trick.
“There was a lot of talk about China,” cloudily recalls Howard Ward, a fund manager at Gabelli Funds LLC who attended the meeting among 300 other analysts and investors.
But apparently that talk of China wasn’t exactly explicit enough to yield any concrete answers.
“They’re pretty opaque. They don’t give a lot of information,” said (Benjamin Segal of Winchester Capital Group?**).
But it does appear to most that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of over $4 billion in stock will be spent establishing a stronger presence in the potential money well that is China.
David Schiller, a portfolio manager at JP Morgan Chase & Co., who also attended the meeting but appears to have little to say, reveals his guess for Google’s next move.
“Best-case scenario is they want to buy a bunch of search companies or online gaming companies in China,” he said.
Equally as speculative about Google’s next move in China, is Google’s next move in the United States, which involves lofty notions of a free nation-wide ad-supported wireless network. One wonders sometimes if Google’s imagination is as good as those who talk about them.
Google opened up a second offering of over 14 million Google shares at $295 a share earlier this week-a price TheStreet.com’s Jim Cramer thinks is a steal as he expects stock prices to reach $350.
“I believe Google can be bought here. There is a scarcity of companies with high, organic growth in this market, and that is why I expect Google to go up. Google is one of the few companies out there with accelerating revenue growth, and at about 40 times expected 2006 earnings, it is fairly priced given its strong 30%-plus growth rate,” said Cramer.
**Much of the information contained in this article comes from this article out of BusinessTimes.Asia, out of Singapore,indirectly perhaps from Bloomberg, which was vague, cryptic, and quotes only “Winchester’s Mr. Segal.”
