Google pays $25 million for ‘.app’ domain
NEW YORK (MarketWatch)—With a winning bid of $25 million, Google Inc.
GOOG, +0.53%
beat Amazon Inc.
AMZN, -1.21%
and others to control the top-level web domain ending “.app”.
The
company won an auction Wednesday on ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees
the Internet. The $25 million sum is the most paid so far in an ICANN
auction, according to a spokesperson.
Icann lists 12 other applicants bidding for the domain, including Amazon EU S.à r.l., Amazon’s European hub.
In
its application filed under Google-owned Charleston Road Registry Inc.,
the company stated that the domain “will provide application developers
with the ability to customize domain and website name application
offerings to signal to the general population of Internet users that
.app websites are indeed related to applications and application
developers.”
ICANN auctions off generic top-level domains as part of a program aimed at increasing competition in the space.
Google
Inc. still has to sign the registry agreement, go through
pre-delegation testing and trademark protections before it can be made
available to the public, the spokesperson said.
The Nasdaq that peaked and plunged 15 years ago was a very different stock index
This is an updated version of a slide show first published in April 2014.
Fifteen years ago, tech stocks peaked and started to come screaming back to Earth.
These days, they’re enjoying another upswing. The U.S. stock index known for being tech heavy — the Nasdaq Composite
COMP, -0.49%
— on Thursday
traded within 1.2% of the all-time closing high hit on March 10, 2000.
Some market watchers might be thinking, “Uh-oh. Here we go again.” But the Nasdaq has changed in many ways.
It’s
less tech-heavy, valuations aren’t at dot-com era levels, and Nasdaq
companies are much larger and fewer in number, according to a 2014 white
paper from the Nasdaq OMX Group and more recent data.
Plus the last tech boom’s CEOs, such as Microsoft’s
MSFT, -0.47%
Bill Gates and
WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers, have given way to today’s leaders, who include
Apple’s
AAPL, -1.50%
Tim Cook and Google’s
GOOG, +0.53%
Sergey Brin. That then-and-now quartet is shown in the adjacent graphic.
Read on to learn more about the changes, as well as what they mean for today’s investors.
Remember WorldCom? How about Sun Microsystems? They ranked among the
top 10 Nasdaq stocks by market capitalization before the dot-com bust.
WorldCom and its chief, Bernie Ebbers, were
felled by a massive accounting scandal, while
Sun was gobbled up by Oracle.
The top 10 now includes Apple
AAPL, -1.50%
Facebook
FB, -1.79%
Google
GOOG, +0.53%
GOOGL, +0.60%
and Amazon.com
AMZN, -1.21%
Fifteen years ago,
Apple hadn’t yet launched the iPod, much less the iPhone, iPad or Apple
Watch, and Google wasn’t yet a publicly traded company. Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, and Amazon had been public for less
than two years.
Who’s stayed in the top 10 after all this time? Microsoft
MSFT, -0.47%
Cisco
CSCO, -1.34%
and Intel
INTC, -1.19%
— albeit with diminished market capitalizations.
The Nasdaq Composite
COMP, -0.49%
remains a
tech-heavy index, but it’s significantly less laden with purely tech
stocks than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
Information
Technology companies accounted for 43% of the Nasdaq as of Wednesday’s
close, down from 57% at the end of 1999. It’s an exact flip for IT and
other sectors over the past 15 years, as other sectors now make up 57%
of the index, up from 43%.
Software — “prepackaged software” is
actually the exact government label for that industry — fell to 10% of
the index from 24% over a 14-year period starting at the end of 1999.
The biological products, cable TV and pharma industries all came to have
more weight over that period, ranking among the top seven industries.
It’s
still correct to describe the Nasdaq as a tech-heavy index, but another
option is to say “growth heavy,” said David Krein in an interview last
year. At that time, Krein was head of index research at Nasdaq OMX Group
Inc.
NDAQ, -0.95%
which runs the Nasdaq exchange.
It’s not hard to find folks
here and
there perceiving the formation of another Internet bubble.
However,
we can take comfort in the fact that the Nasdaq Composite’s overall
valuation is still much lower than it was 15 years ago. The index’s
price-to-earnings ratio was an “otherworldly” 152 at the end of 1999,
according to the Nasdaq OMX Group’s white paper. That ratio stood at 26
on Thursday, according to FactSet data.
In addition, the P/E ratios for certain closely watched companies aren’t back to 1999’s bubblicious levels. Yahoo’s
YHOO, -0.38%
P/E was 787 back then versus 36 more recently. Apple
AAPL, -1.50%
was at 37 versus today’s 17.
“Valuations
today are clearly lower, by virtually every measure, than they were in
1999,” Nasdaq OMX Group’s Krein told MarketWatch.
MarketWatch’s Mark Hulbert sounded a similar note in a recent column, saying the Nasdaq is
nowhere nearly as overvalued today as it was 15 years ago.
The Nasdaq Composite consists of roughly half as many companies
today, with the number of components diving to 2,568 from 4,715 in 1999.
Nasdaq companies are now generally larger and older.
Regulation
often gets the blame for the decrease in publicly traded U.S. companies,
which also has hit the New York Stock Exchange. Critics of the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 say that post-Enron-scandal legislation
simply made it
too expensive to be a publicly traded company, while the law’s supporters emphasize it’s
helped to restore trust.
There remain 500 stocks in the S&P 500
SPX, -0.30%
and 30 members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA, -0.45%
of course. That’s
because those stock-market benchmarks are created by committees, while
the Nasdaq Composite represents the value of all stocks listed on the
Nasdaq Stock Market.
Yes, you can laugh or cry about
Pets.com
and other dot-coms that turned into dot-bombs. But going bust isn’t the
No. 1 reason that a company is no longer in the Nasdaq, according to
the white paper. The top reason for deletion from the Nasdaq has been
merger-and-acquisition activity.
In some cases, two Nasdaq
companies merged, with one listing going away. In other cases,
components would be acquired by companies not listed on the Nasdaq,
leading to fewer listings for that exchange.
M&A activity
resulted in the disappearance of 54% of stocks on a market-cap basis,
and 46% of stocks based on the overall number of deleted stocks. That’s
for the 14-year period starting at the end of 1999.
“This runs
counter to the popular belief that in the collapse of the tech bubble
most of the Nasdaq stocks were ‘dot-coms’ and deleted due to
bankruptcy,” the white paper states.
While the overall number of Nasdaq companies has dropped sharply, it
isn’t all about a rush to the exits due to M&A, bankruptcy or other
factors.
There have been plenty of newcomers since 2000. Google and Facebook
FB, -1.79%
are probably the best-known IPOs from this period. What about Twitter
TWTR, -2.69%
? Well, it listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The NYSE has achieved some tech-listing wins over its rival exchange, as a
MarketWatch blog post noted.
Trading issues marred Facebook’s IPO on the Nasdaq in 2012, and that
influenced some tech companies to pick the rival NYSE, said one expert
quoted in that post.
About 20% of the Nasdaq Composite’s weight
by the end of 2013 was owed to companies that had staged initial public
offerings in the prior 14 years. That’s 710 companies, according to one
draft of the white paper.
The Nasdaq Composite on Thursday came within 11 points of the 5,000
level. The index has not approached that psychologically important round
number in a decade and a half.
As Friday trading kicks off, the
Nasdaq Composite has two records in sight: Beyond the March 10, 2000,
record closing level of 5,048.62 stands the all-time intraday peak of
5,132.52, notched on that same date.
The Nasdaq Composite gets
attention in news reports each day, mentioned alongside the S&P 500
and Dow, but Nasdaq OMX Group’s then–head of index research Krein
emphasized that the Nasdaq 100
NDX, -0.48%
is the index with massive assets tied to it.
One of the largest, oldest ETFs — the PowerShares QQQ Trust
QQQ, -0.44%
also called the Qs
or Cubes — tracks the Nasdaq 100, which is made up of the top 100
nonfinancial firms listed on the Nasdaq exchange. This ETF houses $40
billion in investor money.
But if you’re making a bet on tech, it doesn’t make sense to bet only on firms that
just happened to list on the Nasdaq exchange,
argued Dave Nadig, ETF.com’s chief investment officer. The three
biggest providers of ETFs all have tech-focused plays as well, such as
State Street’s Technology Select Sector SPDR
XLK, -0.35%
the Vanguard Information Technology ETF
VGT, -0.53%
and the iShares U.S. Technology ETF
IYW, -0.49%
which is ETF.com’s
top pick among U.S. tech plays.
■微軟部署撤離中國。圖為該集團在北京的辦公室。
