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Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

nytimes.com

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Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#291

Post by sytelus »

chollida1 wrote: post #17

Yahoo had to do this. They had been hanging onto the belief that the IRS wouldn't tax their Alibaba spin out, a belief that they and their tax accountants alone believed. Most telling is that Yahoo was up after the markets closed on this news. Heck Bloomberg just sent me a note saying the sentiment of the news on Yahoo was very positive, even the machines like this news:) Sadly this probably means 3 things are going…

This is not what article says. Previously they wanted to spin off Alibaba stack but because of tax issues now they will spin off other stuff. Either way, results would have been exactly same: Partition of company in to two. There is zero talks of selling of core business. In fact article clearly says that "activists" investors wanted that but didn't got it. Board says they are 100% behind Mayer and Mayer says she is deeply committed to running Yahoo. In fact she is taking only limited leave for maternity. I highly doubt you actually read article or may be you are just jumping to conclusions but without disclosure that this are your interpretation, not the actual content of the article.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#292

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #167
coldtea wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh just give this poor old dog the old Yeller treatment already. I don't know what's more sad, the fact that Yahoo has fallen from where it once was, or that it's falling so slowly and that it's new CEO, once thought to be it's saving grace, is letting the bleeding continue for seemingly as long as she possibly can. And why not? In what kind of reasoning, if you could continue to make money and employee thousands o…

> if you could continue to make money and employee thousands of people for 10+ years of slowly declining revenue and relevance, would you refuse it? I sure would. I've seen that happen at a couple of companies where I know people and it's entirely depressing. Slowly declining revenue on the path to planned death means: * knowing that the next round of layoffs will always be soon * having a hard time retaining people…

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#293

Post by mc808 »

RyanZAG wrote: post #280
mkagenius wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't follow your logic. That's like saying the new manager for the department store managed to keep the roof of the store intact while losing everything under the roof.

It depends on the condition of the roof. If the manager manages to keep it up long enough to liquidate and get some value from the merchandise that would be lost in an imminent collapse, then that's a level of success.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#294

Post by ChuckMcM »

mschuster91 wrote: post #290
ChuckMcM wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been losing margin (hence profitability) in its search advertising business that powers everything it does fairly rapidly over the last 6 years. They have kept revenue/cash flow going/improving over that same period by putting more and more ads on their properties, dumping things which aren't making money, and trying really hard to push many of the moonshot projects into profitability. During the same 6 ye…

> Google has been losing margin (hence profitability) in its search advertising business that powers everything it does fairly rapidly over the last 6 years. They have kept revenue/cash flow going/improving over that same period by putting more and more ads on their properties, dumping things which aren't making money, and trying really hard to push many of the moonshot projects into profitability. Google is trying t…

I don't know about Saudi Arabia's plan but pretty much Google is in a 'find something else or die' mode. We'll see.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#295

Post by morgante »

christophilus wrote: post #44
morgante wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's search engine runs at a loss to support their advertising business What? I have never heard that AdWords runs at a loss and find it incredibly dubious.

I think he's saying search itself runs as a loss-leader to get people into their hugely profitable AdWords product. In other words, they spend money in search in order to make money via ads. But yeah. The two go hand in hand, so I'm not sure I'd say search is a loss-leader.

Apologies for taking so long to reply. I've seemingly been banned from replying.

I'll just say that's a convoluted definition of a loss-leader. If a revenue line requires an expense, that expense is not a loss-leader, it's just a cost. That's like saying that having a website is a loss-leader for Amazon, since they really make their money on selling products.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#296

Post by jackgavigan »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #210
jackgavigan wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so bad about it? The end result is the same as the original plan - one company with a stake in Alibaba, and another company with Yahoo's core businesses and the Yahoo Japan stake.

It's reminiscent of the endgame at HP, where the formerly profitable PC/printer division has been split off from Enterprise - possibly in an attempt to keep at least one afloat. That's not proof of badness, but it does suggest desperation and lack of imagination.

> It's reminiscent of the endgame at HP...

It's completely different. Yahoo is not splitting up its core businesses.

They're taking a non-core asset (the Alibaba stake) that they can't sell without incurring a huge tax bill, and separating it from yahoo Core so that they can hand it over to Yahoo's shareholders (presumably in the hope that someone else - e.g. Alibaba - will step up to acquire it, thus unlocking the value for the shareholders), and re-focus on Yahoo's core businesses again.

There is a separate issue that the core of Yahoo is performing poorly, and that fact may well result in Yahoo Core being split up and sold off but it's important now to conflate the two issues.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#297

Post by 72deluxe »

kaizendad wrote: post #284
marssaxman wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense are they billion dollar properties? I didn't mean that users would pay for them; I meant that I don't see how one could use them to make money, or at least enough money that it would be worth bothering to acquire them.

Mail is the #1 e-mail provider. News is massive. Sports is massive and has one of the top Fantasy operations, a growing market. Homepage is still the homepage for people who set homepages. All are monetized through one of the most effective ad selling operations out there.

This is news to me. I suppose it is because I now move into more restricted Internet circles (not so much time to waste as I used to have), but I haven't visited anything Yahoo!-related since 2004? 2005?

Glad to hear they still have a following. I thought GMail and Hotmail were bigger than Yahoo! Mail but what do I know!

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#298

Post by 72deluxe »

MrApathy wrote: post #91
fluxquanta wrote: post #29

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…

I remember using AltaVista and finding it really useful. I had a mail account with them. They shut it down.

I miss discovering new search engines (Lycos, Lycos FTP Search, Dogpile, this new one with a stupid named called Google). I didn't use Yahoo! heavily at that time but I did use Geocities pages alot (before they were bought).

Where are the rainbow horizontal rulers now, eh? And marquee tags? They should make a comeback.

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#299

Post by sospep »

jonknee wrote: post #253
rchaud wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends. I thought the same thing would happen to Uber, but they've used their rapid growth and VC money to fund lobbying efforts to change the laws around taxi regulation. As I understand it, these FF startups are attempting to exploit similar loopholes in Internet gambling laws as a short-term fix while they lobby to change the law in their favor.

Uber was never declared illegal gambling by multiple US attorney generals. They fight corrupt local politics, not well tested gambling laws. The only reason the execs aren't in jail already is because they have very well connected investors (which helps Uber as well!). http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/sports/football/draftkings...

fantasy football is a game of skill, NOT a game of chance

Re: Yahoo to Spin Off Its Core Businesses

#300

Post by mgalka »

spikels wrote: post #278
mgalka wrote: post #196

What I want to know is, how has Yahoo lasted so long? Google has beaten them at search, maps, email, and news. And their homepages is still confusing web 1.0 jumbled mess. What do people still use Yahoo for anyway?

Yahoo's survival is a legacy of it's huge success in the late 1990s when it was the most successful company on the Internet. You are likely young and did not experience Yahoo's almost Google like dominance at the time. First, while Yahoo's core "portal" business model was losing market share to search (i.e. Google) the overall market for online advertising was growing rapidly which masked it's weakness for many years…

I am old enough to have a yahoo.com email, which I suppose proves your point.
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