A day after Yahoo announced plans to spin off its core internet business, CEO Marissa Mayer has announced she’s given birth to identical twin girls.
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Mayer, 40, was pregnant when she joined Yahoo as chief executive officer in July 2012.
The company will now aim to spin off its struggling Internet business – essentially, everything associated with the Yahoo brand name – into a new company.
Mayer said via her blog that she planned to take limited time away and work throughout her pregnancy, similar to the approach she took when her son was born three years ago. But Mayer faces a major test with Yahoo set to spin off its core operations into a separate company that will allow investors to more clearly see its value without the distortion from its huge investment in China’s Alibaba.
But with some industry experts valuing Yahoo’s core services at next to nothing, analyst group Creative Intellect UK’s research director, Bola Rotibi, told Cloud Pro the reversal is not a surprise. “And yes there’s always a lot to do on both the home front and the work front”.
Mayer on Wednesday announced that Yahoo will spin off its Internet operations into a separate company in 2016 or 2017 if the company can gain all the required approvals.
And Marissa Mayer is getting fired?
The Yahoo board voted unanimously to suspend the Alibaba stake spin-off and to pursue a reverse spin, Yahoo chairman Maynard Webb said during the conference call.
He said he was “hard-pressed to think of a buyer that would pay a significant premium for Yahoo’s core business vs. what is already factored into the stock”.
Yahoo would not disclose anything else about her pregnancy or her plans for maternity leave. In a note to clients, he reiterated a “Buy” option on Yahoo stock with a 12-month target of US$38.
Confused? We asked Yahoo what Wednesday’s announcement would mean for small merchants whose websites had moved from Yahoo servers to Aabaco servers last month (not without some hitches).
Or does it? Kara Swisher of Re/code, the top dog in reporting the inner workings of Silicon Valley (it also has maintained a chilly relationship with Mayer for years), says a sale is happening with Yahoo.
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She also said she was “taking further steps to tighten our focus and prioritise our investments to drive growth”. Instead, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company ostensibly is being forced by activist investors who don’t believe in the competitiveness of Yahoo anymore to sell off its main business and keep the corporate identity of Yahoo as a shell to manage the rest of its assets – which consist mostly of the large Alibaba stake.
