Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon • Hacker News Board

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#311

Post by martinza » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #146

kennywinker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait?! is that really how this works? What if people want to keep owning the online part of the business? Are they hooped? Seems like you could really royally screw shareholders like that (i.e. sell all the good parts and leave shareholders holding the bad parts). Their share price is about 39 USD right now, that means they sold off a huge chunk of the biz for 13% (5.27/39.38 = 0.1338) of the stock's current valuatio…

Deals like this are made by the board of directors, who represent the shareholders and have a fiduciary duty to them, as well as being shareholders themselves. So that's your guarantee of it not being a crap deal. If you do a sum-of-the-parts valuation of Yahoo, you can end up seeing that the core business has a negative value. So holders of YHOO will trade something worth -1$bn for $5bn in cash, that's a pretty good…

Sum of parts for yahoo is a terrible way to calculate it's actual value. If you look at the balance sheet you'll see billions in deferred taxes. That relates directly towards selling alibaba and yahoo Japan in the open market. The play on yahoo now will be is if yahoo board members can save money on those taxes. If you think they can, you win. If not, stock is trading roughly around the fair price.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#312

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #53

So less than 1/5 of a linkedin. Is Yahoo's core business really that bad?

You could easily invert that sentiment and ask "Is Linkedin's core business really that good?"

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#313

Post by jjnoakes » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

speeder wrote: post #256

SeanDav wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he was being a being slightly tongue in cheek. In reply to your question though - never follow the money, follow the path where your interests lie and where your strengths lie. Biggest career mistake I ever made was to move from a job I really enjoyed to another because they offered to more than double my salary.

But you still get to eat right? I followed my interests, and now can't afford food, literally. I should have went for a job a hate but that paid well.

You literally can't afford food and you are on hacker news? You can afford a computer, your own web site, ... I mean I suppose if you value technology above eating then I suppose technically you can't afford food after you spend your money elsewhere, but the full picture doesn't seem quite as bad as you originally painted it.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#314

Post by Ping938 » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

Here is math for people wondering about price of Yahoo:

Y! market cap is $36.38b. Have in mind that Y! is selling only its core biz so we would have to subtract values of Y! shares in Alibaba and Y!Japan, which are worth $33.74b and $8.56b respectively. However thats pre-tax and Y! could not get that money for them. There for adjusted values (-38% tax)are $21b and $5.4b again respectively. There are also cash & marketable securities worth $6.8b and convertible debt of $1.4b.

So final math looks like this: $36.38b-$21b-$5.4b-$6.38b-(-$1.4b)=$5b

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#315

Post by rsyntax » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #285

ep103 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait, so they sold off billions worth of the company, but then instead of re-investing any of it to keep the remaining company afloat, or give them any competitive advantage, they're just going to give it all to stock holders, and move on to the next piece?

The only remaining pieces are holdings in Yahoo Japan and AliBaba. There's no operating company left.

Yahoo Japan is a different company.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#316

Post by droopybuns » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #194

droopybuns wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman. >>it not up to you to decide everyone else's fate I'm not asking anyone to live to my values. Many others share them. I think the point that users should not exceed customers is easy to understand. Many people agree with me. Many others dont. I have turned down an offer at Google because I couldn't reconcile the bad stuff. I wish more people agreed with me, but I don't say that those who don't are illogical…

> User count should not ever be exponential of customer counts. This is what you wrote. Why make this proclamation? Why should free users be limited regardless of whether they derive value from the service and are ok with being "the product"? The ethics of a company and the value they provide to a user are all subjective and thus you cannot state that the company is unethical or the users are being exploited as a rul…

>>The ethics of a company and the value they provide to a user are all subjective and thus you cannot state that the company is unethical or the users are being exploited as a rule.

This seems to me to be the crux of our disagreement. You believe ethics are so subjective that ethical stances should not be expressed.

I reject that whole heartedly.

Businesses with user counts that dwarf customer counts generally are exploitative and bad for the consumer.

They are incented to harvest information that results in privacy violations.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#317

Post by sethammons » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:22 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #216

orionblastar wrote: post #84

Basically everything Yahoo tried to do basically failed to earn income, and Google came along and did those things better. Verizon can get more users from Yahoo and merge them with their AOL users. No doubt this bigger user base can be sold advertising to earn more money. Firefox stopped supporting Google searches and switched me to Yahoo, will this Yahoo change no longer support Mozilla and be taken off the list?

Who are the AOL users? Are these folks in rural areas out of the reach of broadband? I've heard that there are still dial up users. This however would be odd with Verizon business plans as they have been divesting themselves of copper plant.

I know two people who are now on Verizon Fios and still start up their internet by going to AOL.com... They are about as far from a technical user as you can get.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#318

Post by profeta » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

Ping938 wrote: post #314

Here is math for people wondering about price of Yahoo: Y! market cap is $36.38b. Have in mind that Y! is selling only its core biz so we would have to subtract values of Y! shares in Alibaba and Y!Japan, which are worth $33.74b and $8.56b respectively. However thats pre-tax and Y! could not get that money for them. There for adjusted values (-38% tax)are $21b and $5.4b again respectively. There are also cash & marke…

why do people keep bringing up the alibaba and other assets when discussing the market cap?

this is like buying someone body shop, looking at the body shop revenue, and then subtracting the price of the current owner paid-for porsche.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#319

Post by zeveb » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #130

dmfdmf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my take and when Mayer took over I was hopeful she'd sink some resources into the servers and fix the performance issue. Nope. Its as bad and slow as ever, all my clients that use it complain but there is nothing I could do save moving them to gmail. This was a major misstep in my opinion as Yahoo mail is the company "face" to many users. The Yahoo home page was horrible when she took over but at least she h…

Mail is and has certainly been a priority at Yahoo. All employees have to dogfood it. Ads are included in corp mail and POP3/IMAP access is disabled. You have to use the web and mobile clients. When layoffs were announced Mail was spared and actually grew. I don't know why it hasn't improved. It's not for lack of trying.

> Ads are included in corp mail and POP3/IMAP access is disabled. You have to use the web and mobile clients.

Ah, that's why Yahoo has gone to hell — emacs users don't stay with the company. You see, emacs has 8 different mail clients: rmail, gnus, mh-e, wanderlust, mew, vm, notmuch & mu4e — and no true emacs user (not to be confused with no true Scotsman …) would want to read email in anything but his favourite text editor.

Re: Yahoo sold to US telecoms giant Verizon

#320

Post by beagle3 » Mon, Jul 25, 2016, 6:58 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #259

beagle3 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mark was smart and bought puts to protect his stake and then sold it so that he wasn't tied to Yahoo. In retrospect he was really smart. Also questionably legal. There's this little thing called SEC Rule 144 [0], which forbids this kind of action (attempting to preempt pump-and-dump IPOs and mergers). I have no knowledge of the specific details involved, but I find it unlikely that Cuban was not subject to Rule 144…

Using options to smooth volatility is a common technique after M&A and was likely done for him by the same bankers that made the original acquisition. I am sure it was on the up and up.

SEC enforcement was a joke for years, probably still is. A lot of people are doing this, so, yes it is a common technique, and no, it's not ok - it runs afoul of SEC Rule 144.

No action or inquiry from the SEC is a bet that a lot of people are willing to take, and it pays well for most of them. So does lying to the IRS. Personally, I prefer to pay more taxes, and lose some income (I wanted to protect a 5X exit from downside using puts, and my tax/legal guy warned me against it and introduced me to 144. I ended up with a 1.1X return - I've lost 98% of the profit because the buyer's shares dropped 5 months after the purchase for a reason unrelated to the 5X exit I was a part of. Sums weren't life changing either way, in case you wonder).