Google Shares

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Category: Shares Types

After the IPO, Google's stock market capitalization rose greatly and the stock price more than quadrupled. On August 19, 2004 the number of shares outstanding was 172.85 million while the "free float" was 19.60 million (which makes 89% held by insiders). In January 2005 the number of shares outstanding was up 100 million to 273.42 million, 53% of that was held by insiders, which made the float 127.70 million (up 110 million shares from the first trading day). The two founders are said to hold almost 30% of the outstanding shares. The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one. Page says in the prospectus that Google has, "a dual class structure that is biased toward stability and independence and that requires investors to bet on the team, especially Sergey and me." The company has not reported any treasury stock holdings as of the Q3 2004 report.

Google's dominance of the U.S. search engine landscape remains uncontested, though the leader has been shedding a smidgen of market share lately, according to Com Score. For the month of August, Google's share dipped slightly to 65.4 percent from 65.8 percent in July, reported Com Score yesterday. The latest figure continued the company's downward trend from 66.2 percent in June. Moving into more positive territory, Yahoo's share inched up 0.3 percentage points to 17.4, while Microsoft eked out a 0.1 percentage point gain to grab 11.1 percent of the market.

Google's market share in the US was 72.11% in February. "Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 17.04%, 5.56% and 3.74%, respectively, and are down year-over-year at -17%, -20%, and -10% respectively." Com Score has different numbers and they show that Google's market share in the US is much lower: 63.3%.A report from the AT Internet Institute shows that Google's market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%). Most of the news articles that discuss Google's market share only include the US, but it's interesting to see how popular Google is around the world. That's why I created a Google Spreadsheet where you can enter Google's market share in your country. Make sure to provide a reliable source for your information and to include recent data. The spreadsheet can be edited by anyone and it's not necessary to log in using a Google account.