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Posted
Aug 22 2008, 01:37 AM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Here's something the top management of Yahoo may wish nobody noticed.
The stock is now lower than its $19.18 close on Jan. 31, the day before Microsoft launched its $33-a-share, $44.6 billion offer for the Internet company. (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Money.)
Yahoo closed Thursday at $19.11. On Wednesday, it closed at $19.17.
While Yahoo can say it fought off Microsoft and a potential proxy fight from activist Carl Icahn, the victory has been costly. And not just because the company spent $36 million waging the fight
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Posted
Jul 25 2008, 05:56 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
China now has more people online than the U.S. -- 253 million to be exact. The China Internet Network Information Center says that the number of internet users was up 56% from June last year.
The AP writes that "The United States had an estimated 223.1 million Internet users in June, according to Nielsen Online." Given the Chinese grow rate, the gulf is likely to get much larger over the next several years.
Online businesses on the mainland are still small by U.S. standards, which gives companies like Yahoo and Microsoft a chance to compete with Google while the industry is still immature
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Posted
Jul 16 2008, 10:06 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
The back-and-forth competitive drama between Microsoft and Yahoo has opened a perfect opportunity for Time Warner to once again shop its AOL unit. Time Warner is reportedly looking at either merging AOL with Yahoo (with Time Warner getting a minority stake) or selling it outright to Microsoft. Time Warner shares have risen more than 2% today to $14.26 on the news, with Yahoo shares up nearly 4% to $22.38 and Microsoft shares up nearly 3% to $26.90.
Time Warner has wanted to offload AOL for a while, but now Microsoft and Yahoo are scrambling for Plan B's in the aftermath of failed buyout talks. AOL has a growing ad network and an aggressive new strategy, and could be a decent acquisition for either company. The question is, where should it end up?
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Posted
Jul 14 2008, 05:10 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
The board at Anheuser-Busch did the right thing. It got a offer well above market to sell the company. It fought for more money. When it got the better price. It sold.
BUD stock has been stuck in the mid-$50s for some time. The beer business is OK, but it is hardly a growth industry. With a global recession underway, it is hard to see why InBev wants to buy Bud at such a high price, but, to seal the deal, it upped its offer to $70 a share. Anheuser-Busch was not likely to see its stock at that level for a long, long time. It simply did not have a way to enhance the attractiveness of its business
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Posted
Jun 16 2008, 11:34 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Does Yahoo hate its shareholders? That's being suggested by The New York Times' Joe Nocera, who sent CEO Jerry Yang a nastygram over the weekend. Nocera writes: "In fact, Jerry, as a board member since Yahoo went public, it has always been your job to look out for Yahoo’s shareholders. But we sure wouldn’t know that from the way you’ve acted these past months. I haven’t seen this much contempt for shareholders since Robert Nardelli ran Home Depot."
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Posted
Jun 13 2008, 09:41 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Any way you look at it, yesterday was a dark day for Yahoo. The stock crumbled 10% after the company confirmed a Microsoft deal was dead. Three key Yahoos announced they were leaving, adding to the ongoing employee exodus. Yahoo announced an advertising sales deal with Google, but it wasn't significant enough to sway angry shareholders. The company's stock isn't faring any better today -- down 6% on heavy volume to $22.14 at 11 a.m. PST.
We won't see the full implications of Yahoo's moves for a while. Clearly, Yahoo needed breathing room, and outsourcing some search business to Google accomplishes that. Yahoo gets Microsoft and Carl Icahn off its back and can figure out a new strategy -- and it gets a new source of short-term revenue. But Yahoo has let Google in the front door, and now risks the possibility
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Posted
Jun 12 2008, 01:04 PM
by
Kim Peterson
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Some of that stampeding sound on the Street today came from Yahoo investors running for the exits. Shares of the company are down 11% on huge volume to $23.37 after the company said all merger talks with Microsoft are dead. Microsoft had zero interest in renewing any talks, according to a Yahoo statement. Microsoft shares are up 4% today to $28.29.
Yahoo and Google are reportedly set to announce some sort of partnership this afternoon. Stay tuned.
Update: Yahoo hired Google in a nonexclusive deal to sell some online ads in the U.S. and Canada.
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Posted
May 05 2008, 06:21 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Pegging Yahoo's potential financial exposure from shareholder lawsuits after it turned down an offer of about $33 from Microsoft is hard. It starts with the difference between the offer and where the stock falls after the rejection. That price could be $22 or lower. Investors would have lost $12 billion, and perhaps more.
Yahoo is lucky, if one can call it that. Proving damages beyond the actual financial set-back to shareholders will be hard. Investors were not "damaged" as much as they simply lost money.
The other factor to Yahoo's advantage is that some groups of stockholders may not sue it at all. That would include the company's founders. Along with some large shareholder who supported the company walking away, probably 20% of the stock is in hands of people who would take no action. But, large class actions suits, especially if they are making progress, could be joined by that majority of the stockholder base who held shares three months ago as well as when the offer was rejected.
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Posted
Apr 22 2008, 01:19 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Today's a big day in the high-stakes, back-and-forth drama surrounding Microsoft's $43 billion offer for Yahoo. That's because Yahoo told us how it performed in the first quarter, an announcement that ranks among the most crucial earnings reports in company history. In short: Yahoo had a good (but not spectacular) quarter, beating Wall Street's expectations on revenue and profit.
So what does this mean? Yahoo shareholders can exhale -- the company emerges looking healthier than some thought. Maybe it's not the weakened prey that Microsoft was hoping to snatch up and use against Google. Microsoft may have to consider raising its initial $31-a-share bid -- a move that CEO Steve Ballmer seemed to dismiss earlier today. Or it could take the offer directly to Yahoo shareholders in a proxy fight.
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Posted
Apr 14 2008, 06:07 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Filed under: Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, E*Trade, Intel, Sirius, XM Satellite Radio, JetBlue, Dell, Take-Two Interactive, Electronic Arts
Rating:
Most companies on Nasdaq did fairly well with the shorts in the two-week period which ended on March 31. The two tremendous exceptions were Level 3, where short interest moved up 20.3 million shares to 243.9 million, and Sirius, where shares sold short jumped 40.4 million to 137.8 million.
In a tough stock market and credit environment, it is not hard to see why investors would place bets against both companies. Each stock trades near its 52-week low. Level 3 recently pushed out its president. Although it is in an attractive business, bandwidth infrastructure, it is a patch-work of M&A work with a large amount of debt and almost no cash-flow. In other words, a liquidation candidate in a deep recession.
Sirius is also hurt by a high debt-load -- over $1.2 billion -- and negative operating income. If the company's merger with XM Satellite does not go through, it may not be able to survive as a standalone company either.
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