Flavio about Business 2.0

This afternoon (morning in New York) Google’s stock hit the symbolic value of 600$ a share. It opened for $85 in 2004 and has thus created a 7x return on investment for its earliest public investors. The market capitalization of Google - 186.53 bn $ - is slowly but steadily approaching Microsoft’s 279.70 bn $ valuation.

Contrary to the currently much hyped social networks and as much hyped facebook applications, Google generates real money: 1,104.62 bn $ of operating income in the last quarter alone. On top of that they have 10′000 of engineers researching and building new products. And what Google does right: they hire the smartest people they can find and go great lengths to find and keep them (ever heard of free massage, free hair dresser, 24/7 access to the office or free gourmet dining at your workplace?) . Take a look for example at the following Google recruitement video.

In an intriguing blog post, seobook’s Aaron Wall describes how Google could leverage the huge amount of information it’s gathering every day to make predictions on stock markets .

It’s very true that Google has access to almost everything that’s happening on the web. How about a (paying?) service that tracks specific patterns in Google searches and Blog Posting and an analysis of Google Finance usage to create an instant trend recognizer?

Danish Based Saxo Bank has successfully acquired Geneva based Synthesis Bank, a quickly growing player in the aggressively marketed-to Swiss Online Trading Market, with major players like Swissquote (57 % market share) , Tradenet, Yellow-Net, E-sider and others

The takeover is a friendly one; Saxo Bank was a partner with Synthesis and they both use the same trading platform.

The online trading market is growing quickly and the potential is big: Swissquote estimates that there is a total of 400′000 potential online traders in Switzerland, while only 120′000 currently have an account with one of the major online traders. In Germany, apparently a more developed market, there are 4 Mio online traders, with Germany being 10x as big as Switzerland, the number does not appear that unrealistic.

It will be interesting to see whether any of the smaller players has a chance to become a serious competitor to Swissquote that has a 6 Mio CHF p. a. marketing budget.

Further reading:

Landbote about Online Trading

http://www.synthesisbank.com/files/pressReview/derlandbote20030320.pdf

Strategy Paper for Tradejet

http://www.tempobrain.ch/de/tempobrain_aug_08.pdf

This VC thinks that Facebook is worth 100bn $. He’s running a facebook only VC Fund. He says the valuation of 100 bn $ is realistic if we have 200 mio users in 18 months (time of the IPO?) valued at 500 $ per user. Compared to the approx 100$ valuation of a Studivz User, that doesn’t even seem that unrealistic to me.

Very quickly, facebook could be worth as much as our friends at google: 160bn, at the time of this post. Not to mention yahoo, with a measly 30bn $ valuation. Maybe they should’ve bid a bit more when Facebook said no to 1bn $…

Enjoy the movie with courtesy of Facereview

See also:

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? Yeah, and here’s why: (highly recommended)