NEW YORK, Aug 18 (AFP) - Google`s share price has been set at 85 dollars in its initial public offering, a company spokeswoman said late Wednesday.
The announcement means the popular Internet search engine`s total worth has been established at about 23 billion dollars.
Google Inc. won final clearance earlier 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.
Google wrapped up a share auction, which began Friday, about one hour after securing the approval.
The company`s shares will begin trading at the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday.
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 ad to a Web user based on the type of search conducted.
Google agreed to launch its IPO with an estimated share price range of between 85 and 95 dollars, sharply down from the 108 to 135 range considered previously. It also sliced the number of shares on offer to 19.6 million from 25.7 million.
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.