We are pretty keen to do well in the SEO Berkshire business community, but even so, our financial performance is a lot less than Google (a lot less).
Which is why you can’t help feeling a little sorry for the masters of the universe when even though they boost revenues by a whopping 27% in the last quarter of 2011, their share price tumbles!
This despite turning over ten billion dollars in October to December, 2011, and making net profits of nearly three.
How we’d all like to increase our revenues in just three months by nearly 30% in a period of austerity. But we’re not billed as the masters of the universe of course, and there’s the rub.
Google has enjoyed quite a honeymoon period as a meteoric private company which dominated the search engine sector and then became a stock market darling after a heady IPO.
But, when you’re a public company, there’s no rewards for doing quite well; take a look at how Yahoo is suffering. There are no prizes handed out by the City boys for an average performance.
The trouble with City and Wall Street, is that it is full of ‘teenage scribblers’ who spend their time whipping up their clients about how well, or how poorly, a company is going to do. These analysts help investment fund managers make their decisions.
The analysts study a given company, its sector, its competition and the general economic conditions, and create forecasts based on their scribblings. Pundits collect these together and model a consensus forecast figure.
And woe betides a public company that either misses that figure, or doesn’t warn the market that it will miss the figure.
The result if you get it wrong – a kick where it hurts, the share price?
But will Google get the message?