Unstoppable Google
Could Google break Wall Street's equity underwriting cartel? An internet upstart might seem an unlikely candidate to destroy the most powerful alliance in American finance. But after the scandals that have engulfed the investment banking industry since end of the 1990s bull market, it surely stands a chance.
Most innocent, young internet companies trying to find their way to the stock market must pass Wall Street's gatekeepers, the group of big investment banks that control the way that shares are sold to the public - and net themselves fees of 7 per cent in the process.
But to judge by the early negotiations, Google, the world's favourite internet search company, believes it has the power to change at least some of the rules of the game. Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, may have done much to clean up Wall Street; it will take a Google IPO to show just how much is different.
Two things in particular suggest that the first big IPO of the millennium will not be like those that came before.
First, as the hottest potential new stock offering since at least 1995, when Netscape, the web browser, launched the dotcom boom, Google has a lot of bargaining power. While it may not create the sort of broader investment fad touched off by Netscape, it has what most of the early dotcoms lacked: a proven business model. Thanks to its success of selling advertising linked to the results of internet searches, Google is already reckoned to be a highly profitable company.
It is in a market that is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years - though with Microsoft about to launch its own search engine, the toughest challenges could still lie ahead. Indeed, some in Silicon Valley believe that the Google IPO will be an event unmatched in two decades. Although others, including those of EBay and Yahoo have been popular, these companies came to market much earlier and at far lower valuations than the multi-billion dollar valuation Google is likely to obtain.
The IPO also comes at a time when Silicon Valley shows signs of emerging from a prolonged slump. The fortunes of other early-stage companies, and venture capital investors, rest on Google leading the way successfully to the stock market. Many are already becoming enthusiastic. "The second wave of the internet started in spring 2003," says one executive at a smaller dotcom company.
According to one person close to Google's IPO process, demand will so high that it would only take "five monkeys and a telephone" to sell the shares. With investors climbing over each other to get to the stock - and investment banks starved of underwriting fees in recent years - the company may indeed be able to persuade the banks to take lower fees than normal, this person added. Does that mean that other companies seeking an IPO in future could expect to pay less as well? "Possibly, but they're not Google," retorts one banker.
The second factor that could lead Google to break the mould is the reaction to the scandals caused by the way Wall Street handled stock issues during the dotcom and technology bubble. Those scandals still resonate: Frank Quattrone, the Credit Suisse First Boston banker who, more than anyone, shaped the way the dotcoms were sold to Wall Street, is awaiting a verdict on charges that he deliberately obstructed an investigation of his practices.
The criticism centers on two issues: the way the price for the shares is set, and the fact that some investors appear to get favourable allocations.
The traditional price-setting process involves an investment bank putting together a "book" of orders from potential investors to arrive at a price. IPOs that fall below their initial price are considered failures, so there is a natural tendency to price low. Also, most banks argue that a company should have a base of large institutional shareholders, since these are the investors that bring liquidity to the market. Setting a price that attracts the right mix of shareholders is an art that Wall Street claims to have mastered.
After the scandals of recent years, though, it seems that Google is no longer prepared to give Wall Street the benefit of the doubt. One person close to the company fumes that banks deliberately under-priced stock during the boom as a way of rewarding favoured clients. According to this view, Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs and venture capitalists were short-changed by this thinly-veiled form of graft.
In Google's case, two of the Valley's most influential financial houses will be affected. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins already stand to make billions of dollars from their early investments in the internet start-up. Also, with an estimated third of the company still in their names, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have a powerful financial interest.
One option being looked at by Google was commonly used during the 1990s boom: hire two or three banks to handle the order-building and allocation process, to ensure that no one bank could control the IPO to its own advantage. .
A more dramatic answer being pushed by some people close to Google would be to collect orders through an online auction. This approach has an added appeal for the company, say two people close to the IPO process: Google's basic business involves selling advertising space by way of a "live" online auction in which potential advertisers bid to have their messages displayed alongside Google's search results. What better demonstration of its faith in the internet auction process than to sell its own shares to the public that way?
The big banks, for their part, claim that electronic auctions have inherent flaws. True, they may be a good way of collecting and comparing orders in a transparent way. However, finding the maximum price at which Google's shares could be sold might harm both the company and its shareholders in the long run.
The worldwide "buzz" that surrounds the company guarantees that it will attract orders from many small shareholders eager to make a quick killing, one banker warns. As a result, the sort of instant spike often seen in IPO shares once trading begins might happen instead at the time the formal pricing is set. The company and its venture capital backers would then benefit from getting a higher price for the shares that are sold - but at the cost of attracting a massive base of small shareholders who are disgruntled to find they paid an inflated price.
Google could choose to hand shares to investors it believes will bring the most stable shareholder base and liquid after-market. If it did that, though, it would be doing just what the banks have done before: favouring one group of shareholders over others on the basis of something other than price.
All of this suggests that the negotiations surrounding the Google IPO probably have a long way to run. But some things at least seem likely. The company and its banks already agree that a far higher degree of transparency is needed than existed during the dotcom boom. And Wall Street, still trying to repair the damage of that era, may have to accept a lesser role in what has until now been its most profitable business.
Google IPO："市"不可挡
Google能否破除华尔街的证券承销同业联盟？作为互联网新贵，Google似乎不可能完全摧毁美国金融界最强大的联盟。但自上世纪90年代股市牛市终结后，投资银行业丑闻迭出，在这样的情况下，Google破除上述联盟的希望还是存在的。
年轻而单纯的互联网公司若试图上市，多数都要通过华尔街看门人这一关。华尔街看门人是一批大型投资银行，它们控制着公开出售股份的方式，并在此过程中为自己净赚7%的收入。
但从前期谈判来看，作为全球最受欢迎的互联网搜索公司，Google相信自己有能力改变至少部分游戏规则。在整顿华尔街方面，纽约首席检察官艾略特o斯皮策(Eliot Spitzer)也许已经做了大量工作；而现在，Google的首次公开发行(IPO)将向人们表明，整顿后的华尔街究竟有多大改观。
这是新千年的第一次大规模IPO，有两个因素表明，这次IPO将与以往有很大不同。
首先，在新股发行中，Google可能是自1995年网景(Netscape)发行上市以来最热门的新股发行，因此Google有很强的议价能力。1995年，网景凭借其开发的网页浏览器引发了后来的网络大繁荣。尽管Google可能无法像网景那样引发如此广泛的投资狂潮，但它拥有早期网络公司基本都缺乏的一样东西：已被证实是行之有效的商业模式。通过在网页上出售广告空间、并将广告与互联网搜索结果链接，Google获得了巨大成功。人们普遍承认，Google现在已是一家盈利非常丰厚的公司。
在未来数年，搜索引擎市场可望以指数级增长。不过，随着微软(Microsoft)即将推出自己的搜索引擎，最艰巨的挑战可能还在前方。的确，硅谷一些人士认为，今后20年内都没有事件能和Google的IPO相比。虽然Ebay和雅虎(Yahoo)等其它公司的IPO也曾很受欢迎，但这些公司上市早得多，与Google股票可能获得的数十亿美元的估值相比，这些公司的股票估值也低得多。
另外，此次IPO恰好选择在硅谷开始逐渐显露出摆脱长期衰退迹象的时候。处于早期发展阶段的其它公司未来怎样，风险投资商命运如何，都将取决于Google这次能否成功带头上市。许多人已对此表现出极大热情。一位小规模网络公司的管理人员表示："互联网的第二波热潮已于2003年春天开始。"
据了解Google IPO过程的一位人士透露，对Google股票的需求将极为旺盛，以致只需"五只猴子和一部电话"就能卖出全部股票。他还表示，由于投资者争相抢购，加上投资银行近年来承销收入极度匮乏，因此Google也许真能说服银行把收取的承销费降到正常水平以下。这是否意味着，其它公司今后寻求IPO时也有可能支付更低费用呢？"有可能，但它们不是Google，"一名银行家这样反驳道。
可能使Google打破固有模式的第二个因素是人们对金融丑闻的反应。在网络科技泡沫期间，华尔街处理股票发行的方式曾引发丑闻，其影响至今依然存在：弗兰克o奎特隆(Frank Quattrone)是瑞士信贷第一波士顿(CSFB)的银行家，他被控故意妨碍司法部门对其行为进行调查，目前在等候判决。在如何将网络股出售给华尔街方面，奎特隆当时产生的影响比其他任何人都大。
对华尔街处理股票发行方式的批评主要集中于两个问题：一是确定股票价格的方法，二是某些投资者似乎在配售股票时总能得到实惠。
传统的定价过程是，投资银行将潜在投资者的认购定单汇总成"簿"，并据此得出一个价格。IPO时股价若跌至发行价以下，发行将被视为失败，因此投行自然倾向于将价格定低。另外，大多数投行认为，公司应该有一批很大的机构股东，因为这些机构股东才是能给市场带来流动性的投资者。制定适当的价格，吸引各类股东，形成合理的股东组合，这是华尔街声称已掌握的一门艺术。
不过，在近几年的丑闻之后，Google似乎不再打算把华尔街投行往好处想了。一名接近Google的人士愤怒地表示，投行在股市繁荣期故意将股价定低，藉此回报投行偏爱的客户。这个观点认为，由于投行这种几乎不加掩饰的贪污行为，硅谷创业者和风险资本家被剥夺了一部分本应属于他们的资金。
就Google的IPO而言，硅谷最具影响力的金融机构中将有两家受到影响。早期投资于这家互联网创业公司的Sequoia Capital公司和Kleiner Perkins公司已稳获数十亿美元的投资利润。而且，估计Google的创始人塞尔吉o布林(Sergey Brin)和拉里o佩奇(Larry Page)仍持有Google三分之一的股权，因此他们在Google IPO中也能得到巨大的经济利益。
Google正考虑选择的是一种曾在上世纪90年代股市繁荣时期被广泛采用的方案，即聘请两三家投行来处理认购定单及股票配售程序，以确保任何一家投行都无法为了自己的利益而操纵IPO。
一些接近Google的人士正在力推一个更加戏剧性的方案，即通过网上拍卖收集认购定单。两名了解Google IPO程序的人士称，该方案对Google格外具有吸引力，因为Google的基本业务就是通过"实时"的网上拍卖出售广告空间。在拍卖过程中，潜在的广告客户出价竞标，以便在Google的搜索结果旁显示其信息。以这种方式公开出售自己的股票，这难道不是表明Google对网上拍卖程序有十足信心的最佳方法吗？
而大型投行则声称，电子拍卖存在内在的缺陷。不错，电子拍卖可能是个好方法，可以通过较为透明的方式收集和比较认购定单。但从长远来看，为Google股票确定的最高售价可能会有损公司及其股东。
一位银行家警告说，这家公司在全球范围内极受关注，因此，它一定会吸引许多渴望迅速致富的小股东下单认购。结果是，IPO股票开始交易时常见的那种股价陡升现象就会在正式交易价格确定后出现。这时，公司及其风险投资者就能以更高的价格出售股票，从中获利。但是，被吸引来购买股票的大量小股东将非常不满，因为他们发现自己支付了过高的价格，其利益受到了损害。
当然，Google可以选择它认为最稳定的股东群，如果将将股票出售给这样的投资者，则股票发售后的市场将会有较强的流动性。但这样做只是重复了银行过去所做的事：根据价格以外的因素决定哪一类股东对自己更有利，而置其他股东于不顾。
所有这一切都表明，围绕Google IPO的谈判可能还有很长一段路要走。但有些事情至少是有可能发生的。Google及其投资银行已一致同意，与网络热潮时的IPO相比，这次IPO需要显著提高透明度。而一向唱主角的华尔街这次或许只好接受一个更次要的角色，因为他们仍在努力修复那个时代留给他们的创伤。IPO承销业务迄今仍是华尔街获利最丰厚的业务。
