Remember back when $381 a share looked like a bargain price for Google? Now, after weeks of Dow despair, Google’s latest share price has plummeted to just $262.43, and even the experts are on board. Money Morning’s Horatio Marquez says that even as the economy continues to slide, Google has probably nearly bottomed out, and now is the best time to put in those buy orders and snag a lucrative piece of the search engine giant.
Marquez offers several reasons why Google is a virtual bargain now, including:
1. Its overwhelming dominance in the search engine marketplace, with 60% marketshare vs. No. 2 Yahoo’s nearly 20%.
2. Google’s faster growth in visitors (12% vs. 6% for Yahoo).
3. New initiatives like cloud computing, Internet telephony, YouTube and Android.
4. And its dominance in the U.S., which leaves it room to grow internationally.
But the biggest reason to buy Google now, while you can, is because it’s a well-managed company experiencing a quick blip in stock price due to the bad economy. As Marquez says:
Google is well-managed, is very resourceful and has plenty of maneuvering room. Its managers wisely started controlling costs by reining in expense growth, long the focus of criticism by Wall Street. And it has accelerated the monetization of some of the new initiatives. For instance, even though the economy’s slowdown has weakened consumer spending, competition by advertisers for performance-driven pricing is going to drive pricing-per-click up in the year-end shopping season.
Google’s been hit hard by the recent gyrations in the stock market, but perhaps now the worst is over. Time to buy Google.
