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Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

nytimes.com

151–160 of 300 posts

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#151
post #92

When Yahoo finally dies, my main concern is what happens to the @yahoo.com email address I've had for a couple of decades, and which now lives next to my name in countless address books. Does it perpetually forward to an address I choose? Does Yahoo try to charge for this? Do Russian identity thieves buy the domain and make my life hell?

I've got a list of maybe 50 accounts including a couple of relatively important ones that still use my Yahoo address. It's been on my todo list for months to get them updated. I guess it's time to bump up the priority on that item.

I've tried moving away from my Yahoo account a couple of times already. Some services simply refuse to change your email address, no matter what.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#152
post #74

Yahoo management lacks vision. They had the most popular brand names in social media space, still couldn't innovate. 1. Messenger 2. Mail 3. Flickr 4. Tumblr

the funny part is, if you mixed messenger, mail and flickr (let's not forget geocities, delicious and 60% of all online stores before 2006) they could have what facebook is still trying out to be and then some.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cleverer than people are giving them credit for. It delivers immediate value to shareholders; it delivers opportunities for long term growth to shareholders; it creates one valuable Asian property that can acquire other properties and continue to deliver shareholder value; it creates a US company that is easier to acquire than it used to be, without the Alibaba share, and thus could be bought by a big media c…

Did she? Maybe I'm a bit more sceptical, but what did she actually achieve? 1. She failed at putting Yahoo back on the map. She spent billions on acquiring businesses that bring in close to no revenue. Maybe it's a great place to work, but if there's no money coming in, it won't stay great long. 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through. I would've been happy to cut her…

> 2. She failed at financial engineering; she couldn't even get a tax free spinoff through.

She managed to keep a part of Alibaba stake. This reverse spin off will also be tax free.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hated those ads and also thought the name was silly, even at the time. But hey, they're still here.

The name was from a much more optimistic time in the history of the Internet, when everything was shiny and brand new and less slick and calculated.

Oh please, nothing's changed. Give em a website consisting of nothing but stock photos and solid color squares and a name like Yahooify and they'd blend right in.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#155

Marissa Mayer and Maynard Webb were on CNBC this morning talking about the spin: Part 1: https://amp.twimg.com/v/76b8a5e2-9a6c-40c3-9c1b-e2c8bcf91159 Part 2: https://amp.twimg.com/v/ce42d263-7b9c-4716-8d06-b320ed243606 Mayer seems completely bored by the whole thing and keeps passing stuff off to Webb as "board level consideration". Doesn't make me excited for Yahoo whatsoever.

OTOH if the CEO is excited about a tax shenanigan i will not be excited by the company.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#157

Used Yahoo paid email for several years in the 00s. I've not used Yahoo for anything else. Never did understand what is their business model.

remember how you used everything form yahoo when you were first online? well, there are billions of people just getting their first online experience.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for chollida1, but for me as an "older millennial" (28) Yahoo was how I came to discover the internet. Between the chats, instant messenger, search before Google, multiplayer games online with strangers (albeit simple ones like chess and poker), and Geocities it was my first taste of the types of things I do online to this day. I think it's okay to mourn a bit for how we remember the company.

As an even older millennial (35), I have very fond memories of Yahoo. I remember receiving a two-disk copy of Netscape Navigator from a local ISP at a computer show in early 1995 and setting the home-page immediately to Yahoo. At the time I remember seeing hard copies of "The Internet Yellow Pages" at the local Barnes and Noble, but most search was through Yahoo or Alta Vista. Back then AV had several fewer orders of…

Well said.

This is my Nokia heartbreak all over again

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#159

To come in as an outsider and try to save an ailing web giant nearly everyone had already written off is no easy feat. Wall St. is valuing things like Tumblr at zero and so now she has to do a 180 and unwind this company, maximally and efficiently, while pregnant with twins. Naturally we're inclined to armchair QB, but I think the hand she took over when she sat down at the table was bad. While she never went "all in…

>To come in as an outsider

She's a Silicon Valley darling; in what way was she an outsider?

>I think the hand she took over when she sat down at the table was bad.

I agree with this.

>she played smart

But not this. During her tenure the company treaded water for a few years, lost nearly all value, and now might be looking to break itself up. Is this the standard we should be holding high-profile, high-priced executives to?

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#160
post #133
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be worth that but as stated in the article it can't be realised without tax bill potentially up to $10bn.

OK. That makes a little more sense. The market might be valuing that at 5bn or so.

If you work out the math, Yahoo could sell those assets, take the tax hit (whether or not the tax is legally owed is irrelevant), then by shutting down the entire company, hand its shareholders several dollars per share more in cash than the market currently values the share.

It's possible that some shareholders would realize significant capital gains on that, and the taxes would offset part or all of the profit. But of course other shareholders would not only make a profit, but would also have a fat capital loss to go with it. It just depends on when they bought the shares and what they paid.

Overall, though, when one factors in all the tax effects, the market is assigning a negative value to Yahoo proper. Why? Because they, quite reasonably, assume that Yahoo proper will chew up the cash that's currently on the books and any that is obtained via asset sales. That is, should the shareholders ever receive a dividend of any kind, it is likely to be the current cash value of the company less some large fraction wasted between now and whenever that might hypothetically happen.

Bluntly, if the company were being valued as a going concern, the market would be pricing it a lot lower even than it is. The only reason for the share's relatively high price is the expectation that some kind of spinoff will happen to allow the shareholders to receive a larger fraction of the value of the company's assets than they would if the company sold those assets itself and used the capital to continue its own operations. In the latter event, one must reasonably assume the ultimate return to shareholders would be very close to zero (an eventual sale of the rotted carcass to private equity) or zero (bankruptcy).

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