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Rumors Flying On $20 Billion Microsoft Offer For Yahoo
gadgetopia is one of many who wrote to tell us about the many rumors flying around that Microsoft may be aiming another deal at Yahoo, this time for $20 billion. The story was apparently originally broken by the UK-based site Times Online, and contained lots of details about the supposed deal. Since then, Ross Levinsohn, reported to be part of the new management team, has denied there is any truth to these rumors, leading to questions about where all of this supposed information came from. Yahoo has declined to comment officially.
and a loss of revenue
I bet this is going to get modded down or thoroughly ignored by everyone in this thread, but I like to remind tha Yahoo is profitable to the tune of several hundreds of million USD per quarter. That's not money one would spit on, not in this climate or in any financial climate!
If that didn't quite sink in: Yahoo puts in the bank several $100.000.000/quarter.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
They'd definitely buy, this is a great buyers market after all. The trouble is that this story was pretty thoroughly debunked yesterday.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Profitable as in financial profitability currently, but might I remind you that Yahoo had to lay off 7% of their employees recently. That isn't a mark of a profitable company, or one that will be profitable a year or two into the future.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Which certainly doesn't make it worth even $20,000,000,000, especially if there is no indication that that profitably is increasing.
Yahoo! is a mature company, not an up-and-coming star. Unless you've got some real synergies to realize by acquiring it, that means that its current profitability has to justify the cost of the acquisition. Even if it was making $1 billion per year in profit and showing signs of doing that indefinitely into the future, that would only be a 5% annual return on a $20 billion investment, which is decent, but not stellar; but its not doing that much, and its not showing a lot of promise of keeping up what profitability it has, either.
Microsoft isn't bleeding. It saw a modest growth in profits in its first quarter of FY 2009. If holiday sales are poor this season. it is far better positioned than most to weather the storm.
Correct, Yahoo owns a great deal of Google stock due to the patent dispute around online marketing.
Why Google is not taking care of this is kind of beyond me.
Load New Commander (Y/N)?
Takeover offers are always, ALWAYS at a large premium to current share prices. This is what entices the shareholders to sell their shares to Microsoft (or whoever).