Alphabet Inc (GOOG)

[SeriousMoney]

Google Growing Revenue At 3x Peers'; Analysts Remain Upbeat
Seeking Alpha, Posted on Jan 3rd 2007

Eric Savitz (Barron's) submits: Google (GOOG) today was placed on the Stifel Nicolaus Select List, the brokerage firm’s roster of its top stock picks. Google replaces eBay (EBAY), which the firm continues to rate a Buy.

In a note this morning, Stifel’s Scott Devitt notes that he expects annualized revenue growth for the company over the next two years of 41%, with EBITDA margins “approaching 61%.” He notes that Google is growing revenue at 3x the rate of its peers.

A couple of fun facts from Devitt’s note: he expects Google to generate $5.5 billion of net profit in 2008, which is about $300 million more than Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY), Expedia (EXPE), IAC (IACI) and Yahoo (YHOO) combined. The market caps of those companies combined is about $116 billion,versus $143 billion for Google.

Meanwhile, Credit Suisse’s Heath Terry today reports that Google’s domestic query market share rose to 46.9% in November, up 1.5 percentage points, citing ComScore data. He says the gains came at the expense of MSN (MSFT), AOL (TWX) and ASK (IACI) which lost a combined 1.3 percentage point of market share. He says ComScore will release global search data next week.

Terry says ComScore data shows that Google page views in November reached an all-time high 94.9 billion. YouTube page views in November totalled 7.06 billion, up 11% sequentially, and 8,929% year-over-year.

Terry says keyword pricing was up 7% in December, with domestic pricing up 8%, and international up 4%.

Terry says Google remains his favorite Internet stock; he has an Overweight rating and $600 price target.

Also today, Piper Jaffray’s Safa Rashtchy raised his price target on Google to $630 from $600, in a piece in which he named the stock his top pick for 2007. Rashtchy also said a proprietary survey of Internet users showed increasing adoption of Google’s non-search products.

http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/23410