It wasn’t necessarily that big a surprise, considering the dubious publicity attaching to the company in the past two weeks, but Google has cut its estimated per-share initial public stock offering price range from the originally-anticipated $108-135 to $85-95.
This would drop the estimated value of the IPO from raising about $3.6 billion to about $1.86 billion, assuming a $95 per share price, according to analysts following the Google IPO closely.
Some analysts think the drop in the per-sharep rice range is a sign that Google – which is still phenomenally popular – isn’t going to be the investment magnet many believed when it first announced its IPO plans. An attorney with Germany’s DSW, a private investment association, Thomas Hechtfisher, said dropping the per-share range shows “the tendency of previous offerings, that the investors won’t jump at everything.”
The online search kings announced the change August 18, less than a day after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission denied Google’s request for final approval of its IPO registration, and with questions still surrounding a Playboy interview Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page granted earlier this year that was published right on the threshold of the IPO.
The SEC is still trying to determine whether that interview violated the commission’s rules about discussing, before an IPO, information that isn’t included in an IPO prospectus. Google said they filed a newly amended prospectus August 18 in which they noted the SEC asked the company for more information regarding that interview.
Google also said that they asked the SEC once again to approve its IPO registration document, effective 4 p.m. EDT August 18.
