Yahoo investors running out of patience with CEO Marissa Mayer
“Yahoo investors are running out of patience with CEO Marissa Mayer’s latest spin,” Claire Atkinson reports for The New York Post.
“Shareholders are pressuring management to sell the core Internet business instead of attempting to spin it off into a separately traded company — a process that could take as long as a year,” Atkinson reports. “‘The better alternative from both a value and timing standpoint is for Yahoo to just sell the core business right now,’ one shareholder told The Post.”
“Analysts say the core business could fetch between $6 billion and $8 billion,” Atkinson reports. “Activist hedge fund Starboard Value — which has been pushing for drastic changes — has already informed Yahoo of its intent to wage a proxy battle and nominate its own slate to replace the board, sources said.”
“In December, Yahoo abandoned its original plan to spin off its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, worth more than $30 billion, and said instead it would pursue splitting off the core business. The new move, dubbed a reverse spin, came after growing concerns that Yahoo risked getting hit with a huge tax bill over its initial proposal,” Atkinson reports. “‘Shareholders are rightly incensed with Yahoo’s lack of responsible planning,’ the investor added. As a consequence, shareholders are losing faith in both Mayer and in Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman, and their ability to turn around the company.”
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last month, Mayer’s been hamstrung with the STUPID deal her predecessor Carol Bartz inked with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer (two very confused former CEOs) to use Bing as the search component of Yahoo.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo: Art Streiber)Yahoo needed to develop and promote its own technology. If they had their own search, Yahoo would be in a position today to make a serious play to replace Google as the default search engine on the world’s most coveted platform and reap multiple billions of dollars from such a deal. Alas, they are not and, as a result, Mayer has been forced to tinker around the edges while trying to extricate Yahoo from the straightjacket into which her predecessor shackled the company.
The Bing deal has since been amended under Mayer and, reportedly, either party can now terminate the deal at any point in time as of October 1, 2016. Mayer should be given some more time to fully execute her plans in which a deal with Apple should — if she has any hope to be a long-term CEO — be the centerpiece, the engine that drives Yahoo back to major prominence.
All Yahoo should be focusing on now is displacing Google as Apple’s default Safari search engine on iOS devices.
