Kate Moss Google Non Surprise

kate and police
Originally uploaded by redbarren.

So Kate finally turned up to the London Police and google's stock had its "happens to every search engine" act 1 of the king is dead, long live the king day (their major excuse was "Now I’ll turn to taxes. Our effective tax rate for Q4 increased to 41.8% this quarter and to 31.6% for the year, above expectations of approximately 30% for the year.") : Best summed up (suitably) by Henry Blodget : "After five spectacular years, the company may finally be picking the last of the low-hanging search fruit (virgin queries). Eventually, growth will converge on the product of query growth and keyword price growth, which isn't anything like 100% a year. When factoring out the Google Foundation gift, Free Cash Flow came in around $500 million, up about 60% year-over-year. This is an extreme deceleration (Q3 growth was 120%, Q2 600%, and Q1 217%), and it suggests that a $3 billion estimate for 2006--at the higher end of Street expectations--is probably a stretch. At the very least, it suggests that FCF estimates aren't going to keep rising ad infinitum. This, in turn, suggests that multiple compression is probably upon us. How much? Given the growth trajectory, 30X-40X seems more reasonable than the 50X the stock commanded a few weeks back. And that's assuming something nastier isn't lurking over the horizon." Good analysis also over at Internet Stock Blog ("Benjamin Graham once said, “You are neither right nor wrong because others agree with you. You are right because your facts are right.” We lowered our rating on Yahoo! shares to Hold prior to 4Q05 results due to valuation in the low $40s and we lowered our rating on Google shares to Sell following Yahoo!’s lower-than-expected results and guidance.") But lets finish with a little be-bop from Eric the Googmeister CEO at the conference call (from transcript) highlight By Things that Make you Go Hmmmm (was that a C+C Factory song btw ?)

"So looking at 2006, lots of investment in better search tools, more personalization, much more content, a lot more focus on the advertisers. We’re already seeing strong monetization from our existing advertisers and many more advertisers are joining. We get feedback from our advertiser cycle. Feedback in the cycle causes us to provide better monetization per query, more services and more ways of making money as this market grows and as our reach grows." I was more happy/interested in his "international points" ("International revenue accounted for 39% of total revenue, up from 34% in 2004.") and well at least someone localises these days ! (actually i dont want anyone to localise, make it like iraq and pull out) : "Overall, our international business had a strong quarter, with very healthy growth in Europe, Asia, central and South America. We continue to see international expansion as a key area of opportunity and investment. We remain under-penetrated in several markets and are focusing our efforts on building out our infrastructure and bringing more localized products to these markets." In fact lets finish with Mensa Boy's international reflections when he was finally allowed to speak "In November, we opened offices in Brazil and Mexico and increased the size of sales and operations teams in regions where we still have large opportunities to increase our penetration such as in China, Japan and India. We continue to rollout localized versions of our products in new languages, which is essential if we are to meet the needs of different users and different markets. This quarter, we rolled-out sixteen languages for Google analytics, 12 languages for Google personalized home page and 15 languages for Google desktop, among many others."