NEW YORK, Aug 18 (AFP) - Internet search company Google Incorporated slashed billions of dollars from its target stock launch valuation Wednesday in a major upset for the biggest technology flotation since the dot.com bubble burst four years ago.
Google said it had reduced the price range of its flotation shares to between 85 and 95 dollars from 108 to 135 dollars, amounting to about a 26-percent cut.
The number of shares being offered for sale amounts to only a small part of the total of shares in the company, which overall would have been capitalized at up to 36 billion dollars under the previous price range.
The company had said it might cut the price to enable more investors to get the stock and to help offset the risk of a first-day plunge on the stock market.
World stock markets have been weak recently, owing mainly to global political uncertainties and the high price of oil.
The company, which operates the leading Internet search engine, said it hoped it would win approval Wednesday from US regulators for its initial public offering (IPO).
Google and its underwriters requested that the SEC declare the registration statement effective Wednesday at 4:00 pm in New York (2000 GMT). It is only after the SEC decision that the share flotation price will be known.
If approved Wednesday, trading in Google shares could begin Thursday on the technology-heavy Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, under the stock symbol GOOG.
The company had hoped to have the SEC's approval Tuesday, after which it would have stopped accepting bids on the IPO, but the agency closed Tuesday without taking action.
The company on Wednesday also scaled back the number of shares offered by 6.1 million to about 19.6 million shares, a reduction of about 24 percent.
The total was reduced because the company's shareholders halved the size of their share issue to 5.5 million shares, instead of 11.6 million.
In addition to the issue of shares owned by the current shareholders, Google will issue 14.1 million shares, a figure unchanged from its initial filing with regulators.
If investor demand is strong, the shareholders will increase the 5.5 million shares they are offering by 2.9 million under a so-called "greenshoe" option.
The announcement pressured tech stocks in Europe, where German semiconductor company Infineon and other companies in its sector were trading lower.
"The lowering of Google's (launch price) to 85-95 dollars from 108-135 is not very encouraging for the technology sector," said one Frankfurt dealer.
The planned IPO of the Mountain View, California-based Google, founded by computer whizz kids Sergey Brin, 30, and Larry Page, 31, has been rocky.
It hit headlines last week when the co-founders laid bare corporate details in an interview with Playboy magazine.
The group said Friday it believed the splash, entitled "Playboy Interview: Google Guys," abided by securities regulations, which restrict information released ahead of an IPO.
A source close to the SEC said the market regulator would not stop the offering but could not, however, rule out future action against Google.
In the September issue of Playboy, Page and Brin discuss the company's post-IPO culture and Google's fledgling e-mail service.
In six quick years, Google transformed Internet use worldwide and provided a lifeline to millions of surfers who created a new verb from its name.
The huge offering mirrors some of the enthusiasm of the late 1990s dot-com boom.
But it is also bringing the privately held company out of the shadows by requiring it to publish key financial data it had guarded closely.
Google's search engine is the world's most important with some 200 million searches a day. Google also licenses its technology to scores of companies, including America Online.
Its information base includes some four billion Web pages. It can search in 97 languages and has a bigger audience outside the United States than inside the country.
For Wall Street, however, Google's innovation has come in what is known as paid search listings -- or keyword advertising -- allowing an advertiser to direct an advert to a Web user based on the type of search conducted.