Chinese Search Engine - Nasdaq IPO - Soars 353% in First Day of Trading
It's 1995 in China. They just had their Netscape. The internet wealth creation engine just woke up in China. The world goes to where the money is and the money is clearly in China. Baidu is China's Google with Netscape's excitement. Stocks simply don't IPO at 27 and close at 120 in today's market...but one just did. This is a seminal event. An event the historians can pin the following economic value creation on. It will be written that way a few years from now. That's what you get when you have 45% market share in a search website vs Google's 30% market share...it's the only country in the world that is besting Google. Time to take notice. The telltale signs will be all other Chinese based internet stocks having unnatural valuation increases. Then comes all other Chinese companies purporting to have some sort of internet presence / product. Then comes the internet portions of these businesss being worth more than the brick and mortar pieces. We've seen it all before. The bubble will expand..this time faster..and even after the eventual consolidation, China will be put on the map as an internet powerhouse and the technology world will have changed virtually overnight from a US centric world to a worldwide economic engine..and everyone (including the US) will win.
The stock trades under the ticker BIDU and though it's initial US Nasdaq prospectus price range was $19 a share, they priced it at $27, it opened at $66, and it closed at $120 today with a market value of essentially $4 Billion. Wow! not bad for one day's investment. Not bad for a compan with $5M of revenue last quarter on a run rate of $30M of revenue for CY 2005 (that's only +130x Revenue).
Now all we need is the voiceover and the T.V. commercial.....B AAAA D UUUUUU (must be screamed like Yahoo)
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