At Google not feeling lucky

Everyone's favourite Internet company Google had its stock plunging 13 per cent in a single day last week. The dive follows comments by Chie...

Everyone8217;s favourite Internet company Google had its stock plunging 13 per cent in a single day last week. The dive follows comments by Chief Financial Officer CFO George Reyes at an investor conference in New York that raised the spectre of slower earnings growth.

That8217;s not the only reason why Google has been in the news recently. The slip was preceeded by about a month of protests over Google8217;s decision to censor content in China and accusations of 8216;8216;plagiarism8217;8217; from different parts of the world.

These protests haven8217;t died out yet and neither has the stock come close to its heady levels of yore. The Google stock has dropped 12 per cent this year, on the back of low earnings growth and Reyes8217; statement. It only re-surfaced somewhat after a recent investor conference addressed concerns about the search engine wunderkind. On March 3, the Google stock was up, closing at 378 on the Nasdaq, but still way below its 52-week high of 472. The truth behind the sag in Google8217;s market value is not that investors lost money in the company because founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had slipped way too deep into a private Segway-fantasy land. Nor because the management was juvenile in letting their chief hold an investor meet back in 2005.

The sad bit about the market drenching is that Google8217;s investors were not happy with only 72 per cent profits from the company8217;s young and delightfully-Internet stock. So they sold, leading to the search engine8217;s plunge on the bourses.

The truth is, Google faces a dilemma all young ideologues eventually come up against. With a motto like 8216;8216;Don8217;t be evil8217;8217; and a mission 8216;8216;to organise the world8217;s information and make it universally accessible and useful8217;8217;, the expectations were bound to be tied up in knots once the company went to undemocratic China.

Google8217;s own answer is that its motto is in no way compromised by going to China. They are, in fact, meeting the country8217;s expectations of behaviour from good corporate citizens.