The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the board of Yahoo is considering selling off its core business in a series of upcoming meetings. During these meetings, anything will be on the table, including whether it will continue with the spin-off of more than $30 billion in Alibaba shares, sell its own Internet business, or both.
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Yahoo’s board may be considering this week the sale of its core Internet business, after an activist investor demanded last month that the company explore the sale of its core search and display advertising businesses.
The news comes as Yahoo’s board and chief executive Marissa Mayer faces growing pressure over the company’s performance.
Hopes of a comeback crumbled as Yahoo’s plan to push mobile, video, native and social media ads – a strategy Mayer introduced in 2014 under the acronym Mavens – failed to increase revenues as desktop search ads continued to decline. It has a 15 % stake in the Chinese giant which is valued at $32 billion and a 35% stake in Yahoo Japan worth about $8.5 billion. The investment proved to be a failure in terms of revenue, even though it helped Yahoo reach a user base of close to 1 billion – among the closest a company has ever got to Facebook.
Begun as a simple website called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, Yahoo has grown into one of the biggest names in the Internet business. Earlier this year, there were rumours she might be ousted, and this week, Yahoo is mulling plans to shut down more money-losing divisions.
The board will weigh all its options, and it is unclear whether the directors will change course, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss the plans. Yahoo’s third quarter revenue of $1.226 billion moved up at about a +7 percent rate.
In 2009, Yahoo signed an exclusive search partnership with Microsoft that saw Yahoo able to use Bing to power its search results, and Yahoo’s sales force exclusively sell the Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising platform.
The Yahoo board could also consider selling the company’s stake in China’s online retailer Alibaba.
There has been no comment from Yahoo regarding this report and it’s unlikely to say anything throughout the week if these meetings really are taking place, perhaps more details will leak out later in the week.
Still, even as Yahoo has fallen out of fashion, it’s managed to stay one of the most visited Web brands in the US.
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Nonetheless, shares of Yahoo have taken a 33 percent tumble in the past year.
