The change of heart announced Wednesday comes after Yahoo’s board met last week to review the proposed Alibaba spin off, as well as CEO Marissa Mayer’s stalled attempts to turn around one of the Internet’s best-known companies.
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Mayer and Bogue also have a son, Macallister, who is 3 years old.
In September, Mayer acknowledged that juggling motherhood and the company’s ongoing transformation would be no easy task, and noted that she would be “taking limited time away and working throughout”.
Yahoo has made a decision to scrap plans to spin off its remaining $32 billion (roughly Rs. 2,13,788 crores) stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group. Mayer said in a tweet on Thursday. “BU earlier today, CEO Marissa Mayer got grilled by CNBC’s David Faber and James Cramer regarding the so-called “credibility gap” she now faces”.
Yahoo will weigh a spinoff of its core business, which includes its advertising, search technology, Yahoo Sports and the Tumblr blogging platform.
The company will now aim to spin off its struggling Internet business – essentially, everything associated with the Yahoo brand name – into a new company.
But Yahoo.com still ranks fifth in terms of daily visits, according to monitoring firm Alexa, and this could make it an attractive target for a telecom carrier or private equity. Yahoo will instead separate its core businesses, including a stake in Yahoo Japan, into a new company. As she puts it succinctly, Yahoo has now officially become a “tax trick and not a product company”. Its properties are frequented by more than 1 billion active users each month, and more than 600 million of those years are on mobile, the company says.
At the time, Mayer said she was pleased the Yahoo board was not concerned, telling Fortune their actions “showed their evolved thinking”.
“We couldn’t be happier for them!” she said.
Financial analysts described the move as prudent because, given the volume and value of the Alibaba stock, even a small chance of tax-related complications could potentially put Yahoo on the hook for a tax bill that could exceed $10 billion.
“There’s always a lot to do on both the homefront and the workfront”, Mayer said.
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A true reverse spin off would see Yahoo’s assets and liabilities – except the Alibaba stake – transferred to a newly formed company.
