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Posted
Jun 20 2008, 10:24 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Nearly every day this week has brought news of another executive jumping ship at Yahoo. Today add one more to the list: Joshua Schachter, the founder of a bookmarking service called delicious that Yahoo acquired in 2005. TechCrunch interviewed Schachter and found he was frustrated with the slow development of a new version of delicious at the company.
Other departures this week include the co-founders of the Flickr photo service, a senior vice president and two executive vice presidents. (TechCrunch is keeping a list of executive resignations). Each of these departures is a blow, but taken as a whole they signal something far more serious. The people running the show are panicking.
These are the guys on the inside, the ones who know exactly where Yahoo is right now and where it's headed.They've sat in on the strategy sessions, the PowerPoint presentations and the planning meetings. They are the insiders. And they don't like what they see.
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Posted
Jun 18 2008, 11:29 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Yahoo might provide some good opportunities for option investors, Kevin Cook writes on Seeking Alpha: "The October 25 calls are trading around $1.60 with implied volatility of about 43%. This option gives you 4 months to play the continuing saga of Yahoo-Microsoft-Google-Icahn with low risk, low initial investment, high leverage, and high flexibility—the top four benefits of all options trades."
Speculators start your engines! Yahoo is trading at $22.97 just before noon PST.
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Posted
Jun 18 2008, 10:42 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
The employee exodus continues at Yahoo, with Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake the latest to head for the exits. Butterfield and Fake founded the Flickr photo service, which Yahoo bought three years ago for $35 million. What sets Butterfield apart from the other departures is his bizarre resignation letter, in which he describes Yahoo as a one-time tin company that expanded into other metals, then real estate, brewing and salty snacks. "I have been cast adrift," the letter states. "I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled [off] our own production lines in 30 years!" (Valleywag reproduces the entire letter here.)
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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
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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
Rating:
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 30 2008, 10:40 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Federal regulators are allowing activist investor Carl Icahn to buy more Yahoo shares, but how much more will he expose himself, given the cold-then-hot-then-cold-again acquisition talks with Microsoft? Icahn wants to replace Yahoo's board with directors more friendly to a Microsoft buyout, and additional shares would certainly make him a bigger player in this drama. But if a buyout is truly off the table, will Icahn buy more stock? He already owns somewhere around $1.6 billion in Yahoo shares and has said he may buy another $900 million worth. We'll see. Yahoo shares, meanwhile, are down
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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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