美国今年最令人期待的首次公开发行周四进行，Google股票在交易的头一个小时里跃升18%。
科技公司Google采用拍卖方式分配股票，对Google感兴趣、却不愿参与这种反常的拍卖过程的投资人，似乎随着交易的开始一拥而入。Google股票在周三晚被定价每股85美元，跟起初由公司设定的区间上限135美元，距离很大。Google以95美元开盘，两小时后交易价为102.74美元，令该公司市值达278.5亿美元。
The most anticipated initial public offering of the year in the US was launched yesterday with Google shares jumping as much as 18 per cent in the first hour of trading.
Investors that had been interested in Google but unwilling to take part in the unusual auction process used by the technology company to allocate shares, appeared to be piling in as trading began. After being priced at $85 per share on Wednesday night - a far cry from the $135 per share that marked the top of the expected range initially set by the company - Google shares opened at $95 and were trading at $102.74 two hours later, giving the company a market capitalisation of $27.85bn.
About 15.2m Google shares had been exchanged at that point, making it the 8th most active stock on Nasdaq. Observers said such a significant jump in the share price in the first hours of trading was a sign that the auction process - touted as the ideal way to match supply and demand - had failed to achieve that objective.
The decision to press ahead with an auction in defiance of Wall Street convention was an attempt to disassociate Google from the financial scandals that plagued corporate America in the late 1990.
"It has to be deemed that the auction was not a success, " says Barry Randall, a portfolio manager at US Bancorp Asset Management who participated in the auction. He bid at $96 and received three-quarters of the shares he had wished for.
Much of the trading in the early hours appeared to be driven by activity from small investors, including hedge funds.
Tom Taulli, founder of currentofferings.com, said the extremely rapid, liquid trade appeared to be driven byretail investors or daytraders, because the vast majority of the orders were for lots of 300 shares or less.
"When the price came down significantly, there were a lot of people who said, "I can live with $85. "
Analysts said that even with the jump in price, Google, which was trading at about 33 times 2005 earnings, remains inexpensive compared to Yahoo!, which trades at about 55 times 2005 earnings.
The Google IPO, which will raise $1.66bn for the technology company, ranks as the fifth largest share offering of the year in the US. Hopes that it might exceed the size of Genworth Financial's offering, which raised $2.9bn, evaporated this week after Google cut the price range and the size of its offering.
Google's first day of trading caps an extraordinary week for the technology company. Bidding in the auction began a week ago today, after a delay due to the failure to register institutional investors. Then the publication of an interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, in the current edition of Playboy magazine, prompted scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was concerned that it might violated rules relating to maintaining a "quiet period before an IPO. "