Google lost juice on Wall Street after weak earnings last quarter.
Analysts yesterday dropped their price targets on Google shares after the company announced disappointing third-quarter results.
The moves sent shares of the Mountain View, Calif., company down 1.9 percent — after a 10 percent pounding Thursday.
More than two dozen analysts put out new reports on Google, with many cutting their price target.
Despite the cuts, most analysts still expect the stock to outperform, and it is still a buy in many corners of Wall Street.
However, the prospects are not as rosy as they once were. For instance, Deutsche Bank analysts dropped their target to $850 a share from $890, and Piper Jaffray analysts went from a target of $834 to $775.
The average yesterday from a sampling of 24 firms who set a target price went from $815 to $800.
Investors were not only unnerved by the tepid results, but because of the snafu that had them disseminated at the lunch hour instead of after the close.
Google’s core business contributed $9.03 earnings per share, but Wall Street was expecting $10.63.
“Weakness may have came in the later part of the third month of the quarter, which somehow we may have missed,” said analyst Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research.
Google is taking in 15 percent less money per click than it was a year ago, a result of the lower ad rates on mobile devices, where more users are increasingly accessing it.
Also, Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker Google bought for $12.5 billion last year, lost $527 million in the quarter, renewing criticism of the deal.
Google’s shares had been surging during last quarter, up 30 percent and propelling the company at one point to surpass Microsoft’s market capitalization for the first time.