This demonstrates incredible weakness by Mayer. Giving away Yahoo's future in order to save her own skin.
This should mark the end of Yahoo. I expect to see a merger or buyout soon after this closes.
This should mark the end of Yahoo. I expect to see a merger or buyout soon after this closes.
Selling the stake and incurring 35% corporate tax on an amount that large just to fuel a war chest seems abysmal to do. That would be ~$13.5bn of destroyed shareholder value, and frankly, probably the end of her tenure as CEO.
I can't believe for a second her job is to turn Yahoo around. With hedge funds on the board, I'd assume her job to be to deliver maximum short term shareholder value. They just need a friendly face to do it. Maybe she hasn't realised that yet.
Do Yahoo at this point still even own any interesting assets? Not counting passive investments, such as BABA or Yahoo Japan stock
1. The sheer volume of traffic, available pretty cheaply. While their sites are largely in decline and the focus is still all over the map, I could see their sites carved up among parties interested in a unique views bump (however temporary) -- point news.yahoo.com to Huffington Post, sports.yahoo.com to ESPN, etc.
The brand and site content itself is probably of no real value at this point, with a few notable exceptions like Flickr and Tumblr (and other missing-e sites).
2. All of the user data waiting to be mined. Yahoo Mail has a ton of e-mails sitting around, maybe you'd like to do something with those? Yahoo has been mostly benevolent when it comes to their trove of information, but as an acquisition target this becomes an asset to be exploited. Anyone buying Yahoo isn't buying them to run it as an on-going concern for another 20 years.