By Jacob Steinberg:
Priceline (PCLN) is an online company where people can reserve a hotel room, a car rental or a plane ticket among other things. The company went public in 1999, during the dot.com bubble and its share price even saw $974 at one point during the bubble. Once the bubble burst, the company’s stock price crashed very quickly and at one point it was trading for as low as $7 a share. Since 2009, the company’s stock price is back to three digits and currently it trades at $534, giving the company a market cap of $26.58 billion dollars. I personally don’t think Priceline deserves to trade for as high as it trades for. The company’s current organic growth does not justify its share price growth.
For example in the last 10 years, the company’s book value posted an impressive growth of 1300% from $167 million to $2.39 billion. This may