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> Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareh

by scholia 10y ago

> Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value. No, it went badly. If she'd been able to increase sales, and if she'd launched one or more successful apps, Yahoo would have been more valuable. In fact, they might even have sold Yahoo for more before she spent loads of money buying lots of companies and writing down their value. > I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout. Don't think so. You'd be welcome to provide some evidence for that claim, but the publicly stated aim at the time was to turn Yahoo around. She failed badly at that. Yahoo: The challenges facing new boss Marissa Mayer By Matthew Wall Business reporter, BBC News 17 July 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18867477 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18867477

stinkytaco 10y ago
The stock price on July 1, 2012 was 15.84. Today it's 38.30. So over the last 4 years she's more than doubled the stock price. And her compensation is tied to that stock price, which to me points to a "sell me" strategy by the Yahoo board. Add to that the fact that revenue hasn't even close to doubled in that time (though net income has been fairly healthy due to some cost cutting), it seems to that the market has been anticipating this acquisition. I don't think anyone has been buying Yahoo stock expecting a turnaround. Considering the trajectory of Yahoo since 2004 or so, I'd say that's as good an outcome as shareholders could expect.
- scholia 10y ago
  True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you removed the value of Yahoo's shareholdings, the core Yahoo (nominally, at least) had a negative value. > the market has been anticipating this acquisition Yes, it has, but Mayer fought against that until she had no choice. She lost that battle when activist investor Starboard Value -- which had been pushing for the break-up -- got its CEO named to Yahoo’s board of directors. See http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-endgame-marissa-mayer-2388404 http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-... Starboard has been pushing the break up for a couple of years. It wrote several interesting letters, like this from January 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-yahoo/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-ya... You'll see that Starboard had already been pushing the break up of Yahoo and the sale to AOL's parent. Further, we continue to believe that Yahoo must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL. A combination with AOL, structured properly, could accomplish all of these goals by allowing for: (i) a tax-efficient separation of the non-core minority equity investments; (ii) tremendous cost synergies of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion; and (iii) a strong growth platform given AOL’s progress in mobile and video advertising. The investors were scared because Mayer had, in effect, a bottomless supply of cash (in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba) and she had already wasted $2 billion. They wanted the break-up before she could splash out on something bigger and even more useless than Tumblr. That's one of the reasons why she was such a failure.

by scholia 10y ago

stinkytaco 10y ago

The stock price on July 1, 2012 was 15.84. Today it's 38.30. So over the last 4 years she's more than doubled the stock price. And her compensation is tied to that stock price, which to me points to a "sell me" strategy by the Yahoo board. Add to that the fact that revenue hasn't even close to doubled in that time (though net income has been fairly healthy due to some cost cutting), it seems to that the market has been anticipating this acquisition. I don't think anyone has been buying Yahoo stock expecting a turnaround. Considering the trajectory of Yahoo since 2004 or so, I'd say that's as good an outcome as shareholders could expect.

scholia 10y ago
True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you removed the value of Yahoo's shareholdings, the core Yahoo (nominally, at least) had a negative value. > the market has been anticipating this acquisition Yes, it has, but Mayer fought against that until she had no choice. She lost that battle when activist investor Starboard Value -- which had been pushing for the break-up -- got its CEO named to Yahoo’s board of directors. See http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-endgame-marissa-mayer-2388404 http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-... Starboard has been pushing the break up for a couple of years. It wrote several interesting letters, like this from January 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-yahoo/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-ya... You'll see that Starboard had already been pushing the break up of Yahoo and the sale to AOL's parent. Further, we continue to believe that Yahoo must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL. A combination with AOL, structured properly, could accomplish all of these goals by allowing for: (i) a tax-efficient separation of the non-core minority equity investments; (ii) tremendous cost synergies of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion; and (iii) a strong growth platform given AOL’s progress in mobile and video advertising. The investors were scared because Mayer had, in effect, a bottomless supply of cash (in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba) and she had already wasted $2 billion. They wanted the break-up before she could splash out on something bigger and even more useless than Tumblr. That's one of the reasons why she was such a failure.