CEO Marissa Mayer’s tired Internet giant has gone from Yahoo! to Yahoo??? as anonymous sources tell the Wall Street Journal the company may sell its core business.
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On consideration could be a plan to spin off its investment in Alibaba, now worth more than $30 billion, find a buyer for Yahoo’s gaggle of Web properties, or both, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Yahoo’s board is slated to meet Wednesday through Friday, according to the report.
The board at Yahoo will discuss selling the flagging core Internet businesses in a meeting that will be held this week. Yahoo has been overtaken in search and email by Google and beaten in media by Netflix and Amazon, while its messaging apps have lost users to Facebook and Snapchat. The company, once the first stop for many brands when spending ad budgets online, has been eclipsed by Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.
Activist investor and Yahoo shareholder Starboard Value urged the company to abandon its plans to spin off Alibaba, which could potentially result in billions of dollars in taxes.
One said the report of the Yahoo sale was overblown, noting that the firm had looked at Yahoo earlier, but that it wasn’t for sale and that the company needs to fix a lot of things before it could begin a sales process.
Starboard said that even if Yahoo were to split off its Alibaba shares, the company’s remaining Internet services would still have little or no value. Yahoo would not confirm or deny the report. Mayer’s main project in her turnaround strategy was to push mobile, video, native and social media ads – an initiative called Mavens introduced in 2014 – but it hasn’t been able to turn around the company’s revenue erosion.
Aylesworth, who does not now own shares of Yahoo, sold his funds stake in the company approximately a year and a half into Mayers tenure as chief executive after the companys revenue and earnings metrics did not significantly improve, he said.
Major decisions are expected when the board of Yahoo! Inc. Those companies make up the majority of Yahoo’s $31 billion market capitalization, WSJ said, while its core business is worth just $3.9 billion. Since a year ago, when Alibaba went public on New York Stock Exchange, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been considering to release its so much cash tied in the stake.
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The new plan could include parceling out Yahoo’s core business, which could fetch $6 billion to $8 billion, estimates SunTrust Robinson Humphreys Internet equity analyst Robert Peck.
