Google seeks OK to sell shares
Google has signaled that its share auction is nearly complete, asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for approval to begin selling 25.7 million shares of stock starting late this afternoon.
Venture capitalists and Google watchers said yesterday's request, coming on the first business day after the bidding opened, suggested the Web search provider's much-anticipated auction already may be oversubscribed at a price in the target range of $108 to $130 a share. That would fetch Google between $2.8 billion and $3.3 billion, the biggest initial public offering ever for an Internet company.
"I would suspect they have a price that they're either happy with or they can live with," said Jean-Francois Formela, senior partner at Atlas Venture, a venture capital firm in Waltham.
Google spokesman David Krane declined to say, however, whether the Mountain View, Calif., company would disclose that price today or tomorrow morning, when the stock is expected to make its market debut under the symbol "GOOG" on the Nasdaq exchange.
In a posting on its IPO website yesterday, Google and its underwriters notified investors they had requested that the SEC declare the company's IPO registration statement effective at 4 p.m. today.
That declaration is expected to be a formality. SEC staffers advised Google last Thursday they would let the IPO go forward so long as the company amended its registration statement to address several concerns stemming from an interview with Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, that appeared in Playboy magazine.
SEC officials were worried the interview, conducted before Google filed its registration statement in April but published last week, violated federal rules imposing a "quiet period" on executives between the time they file for their IPO and the time their stock begins trading. Google filed its amended statement, with the entire text of the Playboy interview attached as an appendix for investors, last Friday.
Once the SEC declares the registration statement effective at 4 p.m., the company could begin accepting bids an hour later, the Google posting said. Accepted bids at or above the company's IPO price will get the shares, all at the same price.
The offering almost certainly will make billionaires of Brin and Page, who will continue to control Google's direction through their ownership of a class of "super-voting" shares. That dual-class structure has drawn some criticism from Wall Street investors, who fret about the lack of independent oversight.
Chris Winfield, president of 10e20 LLC, a New York company that helps businesses improve their placement on search engines, said interest in the Google auction has waned in recent weeks as the slumping stock market and a series of stumbles, culminating with the Playboy interview, left many investors with the impression of a snake-bitten stock sale.
"Waiting right now can only hurt them," said Winfield, who predicted the IPO price will be on the low end of the target range. "They must want to get this done as quickly as possible and start trading. They want to get their money in the bank, and get back to basics."
A successful IPO by Google wouldn't necessarily create an opening for venture-backed companies in other niches, Atlas Venture's Formela said. But a poor showing could hurt other potential IPOs, he warned.
"We could certainly use good news," Formela said. "Bad news for Google would be bad news for everyone. It would show that investors aren't going out of their way to pay for technology earnings."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 