Friday, February 03, 2006

More on Google

A follow-up on my previous post...

Google has a superb balance sheet:
  • $10.3 billion in assets, with an incredible $8 billion of that in cash and marketable securities, and very little in bogus goodwill
  • almost no debt, resulting in stockholder equity of $9.4 billion

They also had a very good income statement in 2005:

  • Revenue of $6.14 billion, an increase of 92.5% over last year's $3.19 billion
  • Net income of $1.47 billion even with coming in under expectations

However, it is trading at $381.50 (down a further 3.7% from yesterday's price as of the time I'm posting this). That's 76x earnings. Does anyone really expect that Google is going to double in revenue and income again next year as it did from 03 to 04 to 05? Price seems a little bit high to me, although let me stress that I am NOT expecting a dotcom-like meltdown since this is a company with a clearly proven business model.

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