Google suffered an embarrassing gaff when its third quarter financial results were accidentally released early, which ultimately led to its stock price falling by more than $60 a share Oct. 18 while the markets remained open.
Times got a bit rocky for Google Oct. 18 as the search company announced that its third-quarter profit totaled $2.18 billion, down from $2.73 billion a year ago.
However, that wasn’t the worst of it – Google also suffered an embarrassing early release of its third-quarter Form 8-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Web site, which meant the financial data was accidentally available four hours before the stock market was set to close.
That accidental report release triggered an early selloff in Google shares, with share prices dropping by about 9 percent before the sale of shares were eventually halted, according to a report by Barron’s.
Google’s third-quarter revenue for the period ending Sept. 30, 2012, totaled $11.33 billion, which is lower than the expectations of a survey of financial analysts, who expected revenue of $11.87 billion.
In his opening remarks during the earnings call with analysts, Google CEO Larry Page said the early report at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time was accidentally caused by the company’s financial printer.
“I’m sorry for the scramble early today,” said Page. “Our printers have said that they sent out the release just a bit early.”
Google’s revenue for the third-quarter is listed by the company at $14.1 billion, which is before the deduction of traffic acquisition costs totaling $2.77 billion. Q3 revenue for the same period one year ago totaled $9.72 billion.
This was Google’s second quarterly earnings report since acquiring its Motorola Mobility unit in May for $12.5 billion. In its second quarter earnings report this past July, Google posted revenue of $12.2 billion, which was a 35 percent year-over-year increase from 2011.
“We had a strong quarter,” said Page. “Revenue was up 45 percent year-on-year, and we cleared our first $14 billion revenue quarter. Not bad for a teenager,” alluding to the 14 years since Google was incorporated.
Leave a Reply