Walk a way
The Putrid Palace has no real value to Verizon. At best they pick up a some active email accounts, some websites, and few engineers. Verizon seems to follow a strategy of merging for the sake of merging.
A Verizon executive is once again casting doubt on the telco giant's $4.8bn bid to acquire Yahoo! Speaking at an investor conference in Las Vegas today, executive vice president Marni Walden said of the deal, "Unfortunately, I can't sit here today and say with confidence one way or the other because we still don't know." The …
Verizon seems to follow a strategy of merging for the sake of merging.
M&A is the executive equivalent of scratching your arse. Its what you do when you can't think of anything else, or when you're trying to actively avoid something horrible (like the hard work of running a real, profitable, customer focused company).
Verizon aren't unusual - I work for a company that has squandered about twenty billion euros on M&A with no tangible benefits at all, other than a matching amount of debt on our balance sheet.
"Unfortunately, I can't sit here today and say with confidence one way or the other because we still don't know."
Oh they know. If you think they don't know, I've got a very nice bridge for sale. Gently used, of course.
They just aren't telling anyone which tells me there is something fishy going on.
I don't think they know. Verizon wants one(get out or get a much cheaper price) thing yahoo wants another(stick to the deal). Sounds like the contract to buy didn't have enough legalese to settle the situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up in court. Kind of surprised it hasn't already. I assume because both companies fear losing control over the situation by handing a decision to a 3rd party.
Yahoo stock was $15 in 2012 when Mayer became CEO, and is $40+ now, so by Wall St standards, yes, she has been an *excellent* CEO and well deserving of big bucks. Can't begrudge her that.
As to what Yahoo does that is worthy of any value, I am still scratching my head. If producing something of value in my universe was the criteria, they would be a penny stock.
"As to what Yahoo does that is worthy of any value, I am still scratching my head. If producing something of value in my universe was the criteria, they would be a penny stock."
But then again, by that perspective there are infinite universes. They just need to be valuable to enough of them for your assessment to not really matter.
In fact, the Yahoo core business has indeed repeatedly been estimated to have a negative value. For a long time, if you added up the shares of Alibaba and (independent) Yahoo Japan owned by Yahoo, you would get more than Yahoo's market cap... Which meant that the core business (even though it was still profitable) had a negative value.
I don't feel like doing the computation, but I believe this is still the case today.
Yahoo! still owns a sizable chunk of Alibaba which (on paper) is worth far more than Yahoo! itself.
Might be interesting for a company that wants into the Chinese market, or hedge against Chinese competition, or just cash in.
My guess is that Verizon know that they want Yahoo!, but also they want it cheap.