Google Inc, the most-used Internet search engine, said it mistakenly posted a revenue forecast in notes prepared ahead of a meeting last week. The estimate would trail some analysts' projections.
Advertising sales this year may rise to US$9.5 billion from US$6 billion last year, Google said in the notes. The company released the information on Tuesday in a regulatory filing after inadvertently posting annotated comments from a presentation on its Web site.
"This is sloppy," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York. He rates the shares "outperform" and said he doesn't own them. "This is a particularly glaring mistake and one that requires a real corporate-wide tightening of information policies."
The accidental release of financial information marks an embarrassment for Mountain View, California-based Google, which says it doesn't provide sales or profit forecasts because they prompt executives to focus only on the short term.
The statements were "speaker notes" prepared in the fourth quarter for an internal product strategy presentation, Google said.
"These notes were not created for financial planning purposes, and should not be regarded as financial guidance," the search engine said in the filing.
Shares of Google fell US$8.33, or 2.3 percent, to US$356.12 in extended trading. They had declined US$3.65 to US$364.45 at 4pm. New York time in NASDAQ Stock Market composite trading and have dropped 12 percent this year.
The disclosure is the second time in a week that Google surprised investors. Finance chief George Reyes said on Feb. 28 that growth was slowing and that the company needed to find new sources of revenue. His comments caused the shares to slide and prompted Google to issue a statement saying that improvements to the way it generates revenue from its Web sites will continue to be a key factor in driving sales growth.
The disclosures in the slides may result in some investors focusing on the US$9.5 billion as a "a de facto guidance number," said UBS AG analyst Ben Schachter.
"We think this is a mistake given that the company explicitly decided not to announce it at its analyst day, and therefore, it may have simply been a preliminary placeholder," Schachter wrote in a note on Tuesday.
New York-based Schachter said he first noticed Google's comments in slides he downloaded after Google's analyst day. He said he alerted the company to the information.
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