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Starboard Launches Proxy Fight To Remove Entire Yahoo Board (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP moved on Thursday to overthrow the entire board of Yahoo Inc, including Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who has struggled to turn around the company in her nearly four years at the helm. Starboard, which has been pushing for changes at Yahoo since 2014 and owns about 1.7 percent of the company, said it would nominate nine candidates for the board. The proxy fight comes as Yahoo is pressing ahead with an auction of its core Internet business, which includes search, mail and news sites. Yahoo and Starboard could still come to an agreement before the company's annual meeting, expected to be in late June. If they cannot avoid a proxy fight and the Yahoo board election is taken to a shareholder vote, attention will swing to the large mutual and index funds that own the stock and will carry heavy weight in the final tally. Yahoo and Starboard representatives met on March 10 to discuss ways the two sides could avoid a proxy fight, according to people familiar with the matter. But those talks broke down, in part because Starboard was upset by Yahoo's announcement that same day that it appointed two new board directors, these people say.
They could probably make a few bucks selling their office chairs.
One of the problems of public companies is this sort of thing...
Someone who owns less than 2% of the company is drawing massive attention towards something that will keep the leadership from doing what the company needs long term.
I would not be shocked if Marissa Mayer has had to devote a lot of time and energy to this sort of thing over the past 4 years, and probably has a much greater awareness of how hard the big chair is. Not because running a company is so hard, but because she has to deal with thousands of investors who all want to give their 2 cents.
This is one of the reasons that Dell went private, it was the only way to plan longer than 3 months in advance. Wall Street is so focused on quarterly numbers, it is really hard to make 5 year plans. If a company doesn't post impressive results quickly, the CEO gets tossed out and someone new brought it.
The only thing a proxy fight can do is devalue the company even more. Just as the stupid fight to oust Marissa Meyer has devalued the company. Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Google and focused on content. Content is hard, expensive, competitive and very hit or miss. By the time you know whether or not you have a winning combination you may have already moved on to try something else. And as far as I can tell Yahoo has just a few brand/content offerings that are very popular with everything else just kind puttering along. The Internet needs some more non-Facebook-Google-Twitter Internet companies to remain vital and it is too bad Yahoo has been on the long slide down.
Frankly, Marissa Mayer faced a nearly impossible job, turn around Yahoo!, a company that by 2012 was largely pointless in the Internet space and had failed to move into new spaces and allowed new companies to run right over it.
Ten years before, in 2002, it was a household name, however it largely has lost that due to not keeping up with the times.
It might well not have mattered who became CEO in 2012, the company was probably already past the point of no return. My mother uses Yahoo, as does my older brother. Our friends who have teenagers? They likely don't even know what Yahoo is.
If Starboard has taken over they should fire every web developer and person involved with the crapfest they call a web site. Since they changed to the horrid design I, and many others I know, haven't gone back.
It had to have been "redesigned" by a web developer because no one with any sort of common sense or scintilla of design comprehension would have thought it looks good or is usable.
The next up to be fired are the idiots who force people to give up their phone number to make an account. It doesn't do anything for security or prevent spammers from generating accounts. All it does is annoy people.
This is probably one of the few times a hedge fund taking over a company may actually produce something useful.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ce...
There needs to be new rules regarding boards of directors. For one thing, serving on multiple boards needs to stop. These people tend to be captive to CEOs anyway, and get their positions for that reason. That's how we got to a situation where the top-paid CEOs are not the top performing CEOs. Make a law that you can only serve on one board at a time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Anyone willing to give a tl;dr explanation for those of us who don't want to get lost on Wikipedia for the next couple hours?
Wait wait....Yahoo has a board of directors? I'll need more proof than just this bland assertion.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Yahoo seems like it's in the same category as AOL: Irrelevant. Does Yahoo even offer anything of value anymore? Or does it hang on in the same way that AOL hangs on: An aging userbase that doesn't know about anything else and/or just isn't willing to change until forced to do so? Maybe it's better off being broken up into bite-size pieces and sold off, maybe the new owners of said component pieces will do something relevant and useful with them.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Yahoo mail is still I think, pretty good. I still prefer Flickr for photo sharing and think they have done some good things there.
I think there are more people using Yahoo than many imagine ; as you say I can't see how they could have done any better with the position they were in. If Microsoft could not move the needle of Bing over Google, even owning the OS most people still use - well then what chance to Yahoo have?? None.
Yahoo still has a decent name and some good properties, it could be that now is the time for new directions that would really help the company grow.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know what's a lot less productive than a telecommuting employee that's already working for the company?
Nobody working in that position.
BTW: Another winner company has your same opinion with the same butts in seats position on employees. You may have used their products. BlackBerry.
worst coming to worst.
All your database are belong to U.S.
Let's just skip to the end and launch an initiative to remove Yahoo.
Seriously, who uses them?
Anybody who installed Firefox and accepted all defaults
http://crummysocks.com
Another one, before they started losing customers en mass: IBM. Before they consolidated their employees to the GDC model (which had them working from homes or perhaps if they had a local IBM office), customers would have dedicated IBMers with them for a particular role. Now that many of those dedicated people were told to either move to a remote location or lose your job, well... And all of this was before the massive overseas transition, too. This was when IBM still had a sizeable portion of their workforce in the US. Not even 8 years ago.
What about Mayer's golden parachute? Surely they can invalidate it so she doesn't walk away a lottery winner after all these years YHOO hasn't turned around.
Kriston
just not as much. And they're only worth less than their assets because of Alibaba, which unexpectedly exploded. And there's the rub. Take any company that's got assets worth a lot and somewhere out there is someone looking to gut the company and siphon off those assets for themselves. I looked up an old store called Yellow Front that I used to love when I was a kid and found they had that happen to them too. Profitable company that owned a lot of land so someone bought 'em, sold the land and shut down the company. Happened to Mervyn's too. Like Science Fiction? You can thank this business method for killing off all the great sci-fi monthlies. Their distributor owned a bunch of land too. After they lost their distributor they all went under before they could find a new one (this was the 50s, getting a new distribution network in place wasn't easy). It's so common we have a name for it: Bained.
Best quote I ever read was this: The stock market is no longer a method for getting capital into successful businesses, but for getting it out.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
> Wall Street is so focused on quarterly numbers, it is really hard to make 5 year plans.
Wall Street is particularly focused on whether or not those quarterly numbers match forecasts or not. Losing money every quarter, like Amazon did for years, along with many other companies, is fine IF you're hitting the numbers in your five-year plan, and that plan has a path to profitability eventually.
What doesn't inspire investor confidence is when you lay out a plan that includes increasing revenue by 5% and decreasing expenses by 15%, then you actually do the opposite- decreasing revenue and increasing expenses. You absolutely can follow a five year plan, and even plan to lose money the first four years, but you'd better execute the plan you communicated.
If you can't execute the plan, well maybe you shouldn't be the executive.
Losing money every quarter, like Amazon did for years, along with many other companies, is fine IF you're hitting the numbers in your five-year plan, and that plan has a path to profitability eventually.
You make an interesting point, but also point out how little discipline most investors really have.
Amazon was supposed to long ago be profitable, they have moved the goal posts so many times, I'd really have to do some research to find the original plan.
Amazon STILL doesn't make any money, long after that date, but for some reason, investors love it.
I love Amazon as a customer, but as a business, they are a mess. All the bad stuff of a huge retailer without the good stuff, and very little barrier to entry to competition.
Yahoo sells mail as an enterprise product much like Google and Microsoft, so Yahoo Mail has millions of users under other branding. For example, anyone with an email address @att.net, @bellsouth.net, @sbcglobal.net, @swbell.net, or @flash.net is actually a Yahoo Mail user, the webmail interface is att.yahoo.com.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Yahoo.com is the number 1 web portal in the USA. Alexa ranks yahoo.com as number 5, and MSN.com as number 25. web portals have high fixed costs, and low incremental costs, so Yahoo is worth something. Revenue of $4 billion, profit of $100 million, and employing 10,000 people is a decent company. Yahoo is not a tech giant, and should not pretend to be. I think Yahoo should have done even less tech stuff, just like Yahoo Japan.
Amazon is SO well known, and was so "hot" for a while that people made irrational investments in Amazon. That probably also included quite large proportion of people who either had never picked stocks before or don't understand and use the fundamental numbers. As such, it was a bit of a bad example for my point.
That said, I understand they've now had two or three consecutive days profitable quarters, and the price dropped 13% on the day they announced that they had failed to meet projections - that things weren't going quite according plan. So yeah bad example of my original point.
:) In fairness, I did pick on that part, but I will admit that you are not being unreasonable in your original post re: Yahoo.
I would agree that she hasn't done much for Yahoo, or so it appears. I just don't know that anyone could have.
Will she survive? Meh, thankfully not my problem and she is wealthy enough that she won't be going hungry over it. :)
I know a person who uses a Yahoo account as their second email account.
I know such a shyster too. Worse: he uses Yahoo as his primary mail account. Seriously broken software. Not only does it ignore existence of carriage returns but also of spaces, and often runsseveralwordstogether.
Because if they don't everyone says they are irrelevant and should just go away...even if they are profitable. I had been reading about how Yahoo was a "dead company walking" for years when I discovered that they were making a larger profit (and had been for some time) than their competitors who had supposedly made them irrelevant (and were valued higher on the stock market).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I didn't even go to yahoo.com after this story. I Googled yahoo and read about yahoo on Wikipedia. :) Yahoo's relevance isn't just about web design anymore.
I know a person who uses a Yahoo account as their second email account.
I know such a shyster too. Worse: he uses Yahoo as his primary mail account. Seriously broken software. Not only does it ignore existence of carriage returns but also of spaces, and often runsseveralwordstogether.
I primarily use Yahoo! but it's more a matter of the practicality of moving off and onto my own server, namely due to that I've had the Yahoo! account as a primary address since 1999.
Even so, they do a lot seem to be pushing people *away* from using their services.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Hey +1 Insightful Sig...
Nothing posted to