Why Yahoo and Marissa Mayer's Over Reliance On Alibaba Could Spell Trouble

DavidGilbert99 writes "Marissa Mayer has been in charge at Yahoo for one year now. In that time she has seen the share price rise 70% and she's made some headline grabbing acquisitions — notably Tumblr for over $1 billion last month. However, look beneath the surface and things are not going so well. In this week's quarterly results, we saw ad sales fell by 12% year-on-year and as Alistair Charlton says in IBTimes UK: ' Yahoo earned $846m in cash by redeeming its shares in the group, representing a significant chunk of Yahoo's $1.07bn revenue for the quarter, down 1% on last year. ... The next few years will be a balancing act as the stabilizing wheels are removed and Yahoo, with dozens of acquired startups patching up the rust, will have to make progress under its own steam.'"

Comments

Income source

[schneidafunk]

What exactly does Yahoo sell? Do they even have a mission statement? Personally I do not understand why they didn't sell to Microsoft when they had the chance.

Re:Income source

[GodfatherofSoul]

Welcome to Wall Street 2100, the sequel. I watched a pretty good panel discussion about the subtle change in our financial sector from investment- to trader-focused. People aren't worried about profit or fundamentals or products. Companies aren't even trying to sell themselves to the individual investor anymore since it's all about the big boys slinging massive HFTs. It's about how your stock is playing in the market. I always wondered how so many ubersmart people could be duped by Enron. The reality is, they weren't. They just didn't care so long as the checks continued to clear.

Re:Income source

[Anonymous Coward]

I came here for extremely sexist, demeaning, and true comments about their CEO taking on the burden of viewing the world completely different than she did before she was hired and immediately had her hormones and priorities flipped over by a new baby. Seriously, I've known many women who have gone from the care-free life of an American spoiled brat to a mother who had to make real life decisions. They simply don't give a shit about the stuff they cared about before baby--no way around it. She is collecting her check and living life--Yahoo should get a new CEO.

Re:Income source

[Anonymous Coward]

100 times this. If I was a CEO and had an important manager have her first baby I would buy her out of the job and get a replacement. Doesn't sound nice but the dynamics are not in the favor of the business.

Duh...

[Anonymous Coward]

They've existed by cashing out their own property ever since she came on board. It's corporate cannibalism designed to make her look great at the expense of the company and its employees.... yet she is lauded as the second coming of Joan of Arc or something. The next few years will see her jump ship just before the company takes yet another nosedive, which will probably be attributed to her loss of leadership. It's fucking disgusting to anyone who is paying attention.

Re:Confusing luck with talent

[TheRaven64]

There's an old stock market scam. You open 100 accounts. You invest randomly. After a week, roughly half will be turning a profit. You close the ones that aren't, and do another round of random investing. Again, roughly half make a loss, half a profit. After a few rounds of this, you have lost quite a lot of money, but you have one account that looks really stellar - huge returns on investment. You then open this up to investment, with the disclaimer that past performance does not guarantee future results, and wait for the money to roll in (you can then invest this in your own companies, or just take it and run away).

Much the same applies with CEOs. You take a few thousand business graduates each year and put them in management positions. They all make random decisions. Then you cherry pick the handful that have made decisions that turned out well. Then you say 'Superstar CEO, please pay enormous salary'.