Google joins Wall Street's $1,000 club

Matt Krantz | USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES — Wall Street's exclusive $1,000 club has a new member.

Google's stock jumped $122.61, or 14%, to $1,011.41 Friday after the Internet company showed just how lucrative collecting and selling consumers' personal data to the highest bidder can be. Google is now the fourth company trading on a major exchange to have a stock price of $1,000 or more.

The reason behind Google's stock's latest move higher came late Thursday when the online advertising company reported a profit of nearly $3 billion during the third quarter, up 36% from a year earlier and exceeding estimates. The jump sent Google blasting past the stock's previous all-time closing high of $924.69 set on July 15.

Google's surging profits are creating huge profits for its shareholders. The company's market value gained more than $40 billion just on Friday, which exceeds the entire market value of rival Yahoo, at $34 billion, and approaches Hewlett-Packard, at $45 billion. Google remains the third most valuable U.S. company, with a market value of $296 billion, but it has narrowed the gap with No. 2, ExxonMobil, at $385 billion. Apple remains No. 1, at $462 billion.

"Google exceeded expectations when the sentiment ... was fairly muted," says Shyam Patil, analyst at Wedbush Securities. "Stocks, particularly Internet stocks, can have outsized reactions in those types of situations."

Some might say too outsized, given that Google's stock now trades for 31 times what the company earned in the past 12 months. That's double the valuation of the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index. Yet analysts remain bullish. The 40 analysts who cover Google's stock have a median one-year price target on the stock of $1,100, and are calling for the company to maintain a 16% average annual growth rate. The highest target is $1,220 — more than 20% above Friday's close.

The move higher does have some analysts scratching their heads. Google's earnings only beat estimates by 3% during the third quarter, says Scott Kessler of S&P Capital IQ. And Google missed earnings estimates in three out of the past five quarters. "The upside is modest at this point," says Kessler, who rates the stock a "hold."

Of other stocks above $1,000, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway remains the king of the high per-share stock price, at $175,400, followed by pork processor Seaboard at $2,828 and name-your-own price retailer Priceline at $1,048.

Much of this race to $1,000 a share is merely a numbers game and doesn't say much else about the companies. Google's market value already surpasses the $288 billion value of Berkshire Hathaway and swamps the $3.4 billion value of Seaboard.

Whether the stock can keep running depends on Google's ability to turn its success on computers into mobile success, says Tom Forte at Telsey Advisory Group. "Investors have to determine if the company can be successful in mobile ads over the long term," he says.