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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

Well, the Alibaba part is worth $30b+. Yahoo Japan another $10b. So the world's third (or 4th or 5th) largest internet property would only need to be worth $5b to "break-even". Thanks for the reminder!

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Why is Yahoo Japan worth so much?

Because Yahoo Japan is pretty popular in Japan, and they offer a lot of relatively successful services.

Not that it's ginormous, but for example, eBay never really happened in Japan because Yahoo Auctions was already a thing.

Yahoo Japan also runs an ISP

Revenue for the fiscal year ending 3/31/2015 was ~$3.5 billion; EBIDTA $1.8 billion. 70% attributable to advertising. Like most large Japanese Internet companies they have a bit of an empire building complex going on, and do everything from running the local equivalent of eBay to selling ISP service.

Yahoo Japan is a different company from Yahoo Global, and they offer tons of local domestic services. They even run the equivalent of Ebay in Japan (ebay does not operate in Japan).

Same in Taiwan, where Yahoo has cooperated and merged with local businesses and still is (as far as I can tell) a household name for auctions and their webmail service (as Yahoo!奇摩).

Interesting, so Yahoo Taiwan is independent from the mothership as well ? Is it still popular there?

A bit of googling suggests that it is still popular (I've seen it mostly as a browser homepage) - http://www.insightxplorer.com/ix/news/news_07_27_15.html

But Taiwan only has ~23m people vs Japan's ~130m...

No, Taiwan is part of the mothership.

It's only worth that if somebody pays that, which would be who in this case?

I wouldn't touch an Alibaba investment with a ten foot pole, at least not on any medium- to long-term basis. They would be smart to sell that off.

Why's that?

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