24/7 Wall St. 2007 Price Target: Google, $400

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 8, 5:00AM EST

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Over the next week 24/7 Wall St. will set mid-year price targets (June, 30, 2007) for the sixty most widely traded stocks. These targets will be based on past price performance, industry activity, forward projections of financial performance, outside analyst opinions, and research conducted for doing past articles on these firms. The price targets assume flat markets over the next six months. In other words, if the Nasdaq moved up 25% between now and mid-year, the target share price targets would probably be too low. If the market moved down by 20%, they would probably be too high.

Google (GOOG). Over the last year, Google’s stock has actually done no better than the Nasdaq index. Over two years, the stock is up about 150% compared to the Nasdaq’s nearly 20% rise. Despite the fact that Google has almost half of the search market, there are clear concerns that the companies rapid growth is beginning to decelerate. Researchers forecast that Google’s revenue will grow 70% in 2006 after growing 90% in 2005. That rate is likely to low further in 2007. And, there is a growing body of evidence that Google’s rising rates are causing some of their customers to curtail spending. There is also some chance that Yahoo!’s new Panama initiative to challenge Google in the keyword search engine advertising market may actually take share.

Factors that could move the stock above target: Google’s new initiatives including YouTube could bring in more revenue than expected. Google’s effort to broker advertising for radio and newspapers could be a quick success.

Factors that could move the stock below target: Dissatisfied customers drop spending or move to Yahoo! or MSN. Or, Google’s growth rate could be below Wall St. estimates.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.