How’s this for wild: David Gaffen at MarketBeat points to the new top 10 U.S. stocks in terms of their market caps:
1. EXXON MOBIL (XOM) $505.38B
2. GENERAL ELECTRIC (GE) $415.58B
3. MICROSOFT CP (MSFT) $333.99B
4. AT&T (T) $251.26B
5. GOOGLE (GOOG) $219.48B
6. PROCTER GAMBLE (PG) $216.99B
7. BANK OF AMERICA (BAC) $214.24B
8. CITIGROUP (C) $210.37B
9. CISCO SYSTEMS (CSCO) $199.84B
10. BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY (BRK’A; BRK’B) 200.01B
That’s pretty amazing.
(I have a fun quote in the piece). . .
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Sources:
Google’s Surge Would Make Casey Kasem Proud
David Gaffen
MarketBeat, October 31, 2007
http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2007/10/31/googles-surge-would-make-casey-kasem-proud/
Fee fi fo fum: Google smells the blood of Microsoft
Matt Krantz
USA TODAY, October 30, 2007
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/2007-10-30-google-fifth-biggest-company_N.htm
Google #5 … it’s a search engine for Christ Sake.
“One thing that’s striking about the top 10 companies in market cap is that they’re all synonymous with one thing”…really? What it the “one thing” that General Electric is synonymous with?
GOOG: market cap only a mere 20x last year’s SALES and over 50x last year’s profits. And their rate of growth is slowing to mere double digits, as you would expect it to at a certain point.
Too funny what people are willing to pay for something that’s overvalued merely because it keeps going in the same direction for a long time.
Check out the Googometer on wsj.com.
…and remember the IPO? The “Dutch Auction??
It was regarded with great suspect — something to steer clear of…
–Ken
Maybe it’s mentioned in the article but why is Berkshire below Cisco?
55+x earnings doesn’t seem overpriced at all(GOOG). Can’t stop this train!
I believe that the last company to ascend so quickly to the top 10 was Enron.
“What it the “one thing” that General Electric is synonymous with?”
Something that all people should be aware of:
Financial Engineering
ever since Welch left that is all they know.
Ciao
MS
Google is an interesting company that is part cash machine, part self-contained VC.
Their cash machine is their advertising business: Google is an advertising company; I believe all of its other operations produce LARGE negative profit, since after all, they are free!
I advertise on adwords, and find it very difficult to pin-down the value. Google provides me with a monthly bill and all kinds of analysis to show I’m getting clicks and on which ads, etc., etc.
Thing is, I now can rarely tie a sale to a Google adwords click and in the past, when I looked closely, my clicks were coming almost exclusively from their advertiser sites, not the search engine.
There is a whole cottage industry of fake websites built around Google adwords, mostly these are search consolidators that act like category-driven searches but are all ads–examples: stosna.net, websevice.com (that’s webservice miss-spelled).
Adwords has become rotten, in my opinion. The cash machine is ripe with internal ponzi schemes and I believe that despite Google’s best efforts (and how hard do they want to try anyway?), click fraud is rampant and keeps morphing in how it is implemented.
I guess my point is, the cash machine is currently running on a lot of fraud…the only reason to bet on Google is all of those other products they are building with the cash…how are they going to make profits in the future?
I guess my point is, the cash machine is currently running on a lot of fraud…the only reason to bet on Google is all of those other products they are building with the cash…how are they going to make profits in the future?
*ding*
Google hasn’t had a single great product since search, just a long string of failures (froogle) and mediocrities (gmail), coupled with a few hot name acquisitions that have quickly fizzled. Adwords is an incredibly easy service to replicate and automate and has almost no switching costs, therefore, at some point, competition will drive it into a commodity business.
Given that we are currently in an all-hype-all-the-time economy though, who knows how long this can go on.
NB: I also called the housing bubble. In 2004. So while I may have a point, you may lose vast sums of money listening to it.
Cheers,
prat
A follow-up on my Google clickfraud experience. I just ran a web log analyzer I wrote a while back to check on the last month, and of the $400/mo bill I paid Google, I can I.D. that probably 90% of the sites my clicks originated from are pure crap.
Not only that, I’ve got probably $20 of clicks coming from one address. This is classic click fraud, and I’m very clear that it is not something Google is trying to stop. It is too obvious. Google is happy to let this continue until “something happens…”
I find it interesting that Google is on this non-stop runup just as concerns over their future growth should be ringing bells in investors minds. Their biggest $ advertisers are financial and mortgage companies who are suffering the most pain right now.
Do people really think they’ll continue to expand their advertising campaigns on google into the future?
I tend to get recruited by Google two to three times a year. They have no idea what they want me to do, just found my resume and it looked interesting to them.
After a few times of this nonsense, I told them to stop bugging me.
two words:
click farms
biggest and most pervasive fraud going today. Unfortunately no journalist will touch it for fear of being black balled for life.
Ciao
MS
34 percent of all Google revenues come from Adsense partner sites. I would bet a majority of these revenues come from high volume publishers.
The crappy AdSense sites you are referring to are generally known as ‘Made-For-Adsense’ sites. Google has taken some steps to address these sites, but some claim visitors from these sites are just as valuable as visitors from high quality sites.
Almost every company I know that runs AdWords campaigns turns off the Adsense network on their campaign. If they don’t turn off the content network, they set up separate campaigns with much lower bids.
Google puts the number of invalid clicks on their content network at around 10% and they claim to identify all but about .02% of these clicks. Fraudulent clicks may be higher than .02% but I think it would be a dumb strategy for Google to knowingly lie about clickfraud.
Sources
Google Q3 Revenue Up Nearly 60 Percent as Ad Expansion Continues
http://www.clickz.com/3627351
Believing Google’s Click Fraud Numbers
http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/01/believing-googles-click-fraud-numbers
I did a simple regression on GOOG since 15 August 2007. The exponential interest rate would be around 167%. At that rate, GOOG will be the largest cap stock around around 18 May 2008. Maybe someday it will really be 10 to the power 100? (or not).
If memory serves, Cisco became the largest company in the world by market cap on the day the Nasdaq topped in 2000. When it did, Cisco was widely predicted to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
Maybe Google is headed for #1 this time.
While click fraud is definitely a problem, those of you who use adwords should be more concerned about having the knowledge needed to make your campaigns profitable. I can more than justify my ROI (that wasn’t always the case).
I hope Google cleans up the dirtier side of their business, but as long as they continue to bring home the bacon, more power to them.