Yahoo Rejects Another Bid From Microsoft, Icahn 119
Last night Yahoo rejected another offer for its search business from Microsoft and investor Carl Icahn. The proposal also included conditions that would have required the replacement of Yahoo's top management and board of directors. This is not the first time Icahn has pushed for such a measure. Quoting:
"Yahoo said in rejecting the offer it told Microsoft it was willing to sell the entire company for at least $33 a share and its board believed such a deal could be negotiated and executed before its annual shareholders meeting on August 1. Yahoo said it also informed the software giant it remained willing to negotiate an 'improved search-only transaction.' Microsoft, however, rejected both offers, Yahoo stated."
Re:I hope yahoo stands firm (Score:5, Informative)
>I know one thing if I had any plans to hold Yahoo stock for past next few months I'd be voteing to keep the current board.
Well then you are a bad investor. And you are damming Wallstreet without even knowing the entire story.
Have you looked at the bottom line of Yahoo lately? Read their cashflow statements maybe? If you had then you would be furious since Yahoo is doing a good job of screwing itself into the ground.
Yeah I made some money buying Puts when the Microsoft Yahoo deal was announced. I knew Yahoo was too damm stupid for its own good. The problem Yahoo has is that it has some great properties, but it can't monetize those properties. That's why Yahoo is executing way under its potential.
Re:Dear Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
If Microsoft get their hands on Patent 6,269,361 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,269,361.PN.&OS=PN/6,269,361&RS=PN/6,269,361 [uspto.gov] there might not be an elsewhere for them to go to.
Re:I hope yahoo stands firm (Score:5, Informative)
Yahoo isn't a $19 stock, and investors wouldn't make a 50% return.
It's a volatile stock which was at $31 three months prior to the Microsoft offer. The $19 price at the time when MS made its offer was unusually low, and I wouldn't be surprised if the SEC investigated events surrounding the the fall in Yahoo share value in the months leading up to the bid.
The purchase price for the search assets would also have been taxable, which means Yahoo would only have netted 70% of the offer's value. In reality, Microsoft's initial bid didn't appear to be a serious attempt to purchase - there's more to this game than a simple buyout.
Re:Stand up for what you believe (Score:3, Informative)
At least you read the headline. If you read the summary, you will see that the Yahoo! board offered to sell the company to Microsoft for $33 a share. I guess someone could twist that into giving them the finger, but I wouldn't.
Re:I hope yahoo stands firm (Score:5, Informative)
The otherwise farfetched-but-partially-plausible article that Slashdot ran last week [techuser.net] had one thing very right: there's no logical reason to believe, based on YHOO's performance over the year prior to Microsoft's first offer, that $19 was anything but a temporary low blip before Microsoft swooped in like a vulture at just the right moment to make their takeover bid look more impressive.
The average YHOO stock price over the preceding year [tinyurl.com] was (eyeballing here) roughly $27 per share, with a general slight downward trend but still high enough that a linear fit would still predict a price around $23-$25 (again, eyeballing) at the time of Microsoft's first public offer. When you compare YHOO to NASDAQ over that same year [tinyurl.com], it becomes obvious that the timing of YHOO's ups and downs had much more to do with volatility and emotions on NASDAQ (and the larger oil-credit-bear global stock market) than it did with news regarding Yahoo itself. The buys and sells, modulo the bump-and-slump after the layoff announcement on Jan 21, clearly aren't due to new information about Yahoo's fundamentals as a company, so it seems fairly reasonable that the $19 share price (which lasted for a mere 2 days) wouldn't have lasted any longer than the wait for the next ephemeral upward bump in the NASDAQ. (Not that YHOO would've outperformed NASDAQ, necessarily, but it quite likely would've be back to the $21-$23 range soon enough, and possibly higher.)
When you combine this information, it makes Microsoft's $31 deal look much more like a lowball number that it does at first glance, and makes it quite clear that Yahoo's board was reasonable to perceive it as such, even if it turns out they were wrong in the final analysis.
In addition, for most of the last 5 years, YHOO has traded $25 or higher, and sometimes as high as $40. Traders who bought YHOO as a long-term tech investment when it was $25 or higher -- likely the majority of YHOO shareholders -- would've been treated to a much less impressive return in the MS deal, or even a loss depending on the original buy price. For them, the MS deal could easily be beaten by simple share appreciation over 5 to 10 years if Yahoo just manages to get its house in order, even if it's merely to be a more solid runner-up behind Google. Yahoo is, after all, #2 overall and #1 in certain markets when it comes to search, and they own Overture, the only company that's been doing online text ad auctions for longer than Google, so they clearly have the potential for a turnaround. This whole Microsoft fiasco might be the kick in the pants they needed to make it actually happen.
So, in the long analysis for all those investors who bought before YHOO reached $19, it's not even remotely a guarantee that they would've been happy with Microsoft's $31 numbers, or that they're upset the Microsoft deal fell through on the terms that it did. Anyone who says "I poached YHOO at $19 and got ripped off because I didn't get my 63% return" is a moron short-term gambler who deserves to get burned.