by Matthieu Demeestere
NEW YORK, Aug 18 (AFP) - Google Inc. won final clearance Wednesday for a cut-price initial public offering after demand flopped for the biggest technology debut since the dot-com bubble burst.
The Securities and Exchange Commission gave the go-ahead for the frequently delayed offering by making its registration effective.
"It is effective," said SEC spokesman John Nestor. On Tuesday, the SEC, without making public any explanation, had not met a similar request for approval by Google.
Google wrapped up a share auction, which began Friday, about one hour after securing the approval.
"The underwriters closed the auction for Google`s initial public offering," the Internet giant said in a statement.
It is not known how long it will take to declare a final price and to sell shares to winning bidders before Google begins trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol GOOG.
Google said the new estimated share price range was 85 to 95 dollars, sharply down from 108 to 135 previously. It also sliced the number of shares on offer to 19.6 million from 25.7 million.
The maximum the Internet giant can now rake in, excluding share over-allotments, is 1.86 billion dollars, a stunning climbdown from initial expectations of 3.47 billion dollars.
The new maximum price values the entire company at 25.7 billion dollars, down from 36.6 billion dollars.
In an amended prospectus filed Wednesday, Google said the SEC had "requested additional information" concerning publication of an interview of its founders with Playboy magazine.
Founders of the Mountain View, California-based Google -- computer whiz kids Sergey Brin, 30, and Larry Page, 31 -- laid bare corporate details in the Playboy interview published last week.
Google says it does not believe the article flouted a rule imposing a "quiet period" ahead of stock offerings. During the quiet period, a company may not disclose information beyond what is in the prospectus.
The downgraded IPO "is reflective of the weakness of the tech market right now, even if you are doing something as well modeled as (Google)," said Anais Faraj, a market analyst at Nomura Securities in London.
"The Nasdaq looks like a very sick beast. We`ve had a year and a half of a tech rally and it broke about a quarter ago. Even the Google-ite retail investors are thinking twice about buying tech stocks with these valuations," he said.
Under the new offering, which represents about seven percent of the entire company, Google itself is keeping the number of shares it sells unchanged at 14.14 million.
But the existing Google shareholders, including Google`s founders, are reducing the number on offer by about 6.1 million to just 5.5 million shares.
Founders Page and Brin halved the number they plan to sell to about 500,000 shares each.
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, running 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.