Yahoo! surges on takeover rumour

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5 October 2011 Last updated at 21:40 GMT Yahoo is one of the internet's best-known brands Shares in the internet portal firm Yahoo have leapt 10% on rumours that Microsoft is considering a second attempt at a takeover.

Microsoft, which last bid in 2008, joins a host of other companies which are considering buying Yahoo, one of the internet's best-known brands.

China's giant internet company Alibaba has already said it might buy Yahoo.

Rumours of a bid from Vodafone also pushed shares in Blackberry maker, Research in Motion, 12% higher.

Yahoo shares jumped 10.1% to close at $15.92 and Microsoft shares ended 2.2% higher at $25.89.

Yahoo's current market value is $20bn (£13bn), compared with Microsoft's previous bid of around $45bn.

Neither party has made any official comment.

Microsoft is said to be divided as to whether it would make sense to mount such a bid.

Reasons in favour include the ability to beat AOL as a competitor by creating a stronger web portal.

Market share

Microsoft already has an agreement with Yahoo involving its Bing internet search engine, which powers Yahoo's search but gives 88% of advertising revenue back to Yahoo.

Combing the two could give Yahoo 30% of the US search market, according to analysts.

According to the latest figures from research firm comScore, Google has 64.8% of the US search market, Yahoo has 16.3% and Microsoft 14.7%.

But Yahoo is seen as lacking in growth potential.

Early last month, Yahoo fired its chief executive in a row over the company's future direction.

It said last month that it had received "inbound interest" from a number of parties.

Sid Parakh, analyst at fund firm McAdams Wright Ragen, told the Reuters news agency: "There are many reasons why this thing probably makes sense.

"If you strip out the variety of assets Yahoo owns, you are pretty much paying nothing for the core business."

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Yahoo, ABC News Announce Partnership

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Monday, ABC News and Yahoo announced a new partnership. Yahoo wants ABC News to bring more content to its site, and ABC News is interested in Yahoo's big audience.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

GUY RAZ, host: And I'm Guy Raz. And it's time now for All Tech Considered.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: The latest marriage of big technology and big media was announced this morning in Times Square, before a crowd of cheering tourists.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

ROBIN ROBERTS: And you can see, we are not the only ones excited about this partnership. Our crowd is...

RAZ: "Good Morning America's" Robin Roberts announcing a deal that will bring ABC News content to Yahoo.

But as NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, those excited bystanders don't reflect harsher realities facing one of the country's best-known news brands, and the world's most visited website.

NEDA ULABY: When ABC people talk about this deal in public, they repeat two phrases like a mantra: 100 million and game changer.

BEN SHERWOOD: This is a game changer for ABC News.

ULABY: That's the network's news president, Ben Sherwood.

SHERWOOD: Yahoo is a colossus online. It gets 100 million unique users in news. It has around 700 million users worldwide.

ULABY: And in return for the sheer size of that funnel, Yahoo, a terrific news aggregator, gets unique content from a celebrated news team, says Rafat Ali. He started the website paidContent. But this is not the first time Yahoo has partnered with network news. It's not even the first time it's partnered with ABC.

RAFAT ALI: I guess it's a case of heard it all, seen it all before.

ULABY: Rafat says historically, it's been hard to combine a techie Silicon Valley mentality with East Coast-centric media culture. If you go to "Good Morning America's" website right now, you're redirected to gma.yahoo.com. Ali says he's willing to go on the record...

ALI: On the record, guaranteed within three years...

ULABY: It will go back to being just gma.com.

ALI: I mean, I can give you 500 examples of this, including CNBC used to be cnbc.yahoo.finance.yahoo.com - something like that.

ULABY: The problems of ABC News include a weak online presence, the lack of a cable partner like MSNBC, and leadership in constant flux, says Rafat Ali. Still, he sees a little more digital mojo in its splashy first project with Yahoo News - today's George Stephanopoulos interview with President Obama.

(SOUNDBITE OF INTERVIEW)

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you put a stop to that?

President BARACK OBAMA: Well, what we did was, we put a stop through...

ULABY: It may take more for Yahoo to regain the traffic it's lost to Gmail and Facebook.

Twenty-nine-year-old Melissa Dilow(ph) ditched her Yahoo account for Gmail. So would she, let's say, go back to Yahoo to watch ABC News videos?

MELISSA DILOW: No, I get my news on my apps on my iPad. I would have no use for that, personally.

ULABY: Yahoo stock ticked up about 6 percent after today's announcement. But investors attribute that to a separate statement from a Chinese investor who says he's interested in buying the website.

Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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ABC News And Yahoo! Open A New Partnership With A Presidential Chat

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George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is a big part of the new partnership between ABC and Yahoo!, announced today.

Lou Rocco/ABC

George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is a big part of the new partnership between ABC and Yahoo!, announced today.

ABC News and Yahoo! announced today that they are teaming up in a "strategic online news alliance" they hope will reach 100 million U.S. users a month. And they're not starting small: George Stephanopoulos will interview President Obama at 2:35 this afternoon for a webcast on ABCNews.com and Yahoo.com. The partnership will make ABC News, according to the press release, "the premier news provider on Yahoo! News." The press release says that Yahoo! will have editorial control over its sites and ABC News will have editorial control over its sites (ABCNews.com and GoodMorningAmerica.com).

This partnership, in part because of its sheer size and reach, will be inevitably compared to the teaming up of AOL and the Huffington Post, despite the fact that that was structured as an acquisition of the latter by the former and this is being called a "strategic alliance," a more diplomacy-inspired term. Moreover, that was two existing online properties, and this is a primarily online-driven outlet teaming up with a primarily television-driven one.

But television news and online news have teamed up before, most notably at MSNBC.com, a joint project between Microsoft and NBC. (Microsoft is no longer involved in MSNBC, the cable channel, which is a separate company from the web site.) The cross-branding of NBC content and MSNBC.com content is pervasive and sometimes perplexing — all of MSNBC.com's entertainment content, for instance, is now branded as part of the site for NBC's Today.

More than selling the partnership itself, the two companies are focused on the new online content produced especially for this purpose that will be available through Yahoo's "global technology platform." In addition to the Newsmakers series that will debut with the Stephanopoulos-Obama interview, there will be an online series with Christine Amanpour and one with Bill Weir, Nightline's co-anchor, focusing on technology and innovation.

How much interest the new content generates may well drive initial reactions to the agreement. Ordinary site users likely won't care about the behind-the-scenes changes to how things are financed and branded, and there isn't an obvious celebrity angle, the way there was when Arianna Huffington essentially took over managing content at AOL. Yahoo! has certainly had its share of negative press, and as recently as last week was being casually referred to as "beleaguered." Some fresh content (like, for instance, a live interview with a newsmaker) is likely welcome. For ABC, there's the promise of Yahoo!'s enormously well-trafficked news portal, which will now send people plenty of ABC News content.

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Bartz resigns from Yahoo Board

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz offers a speech the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 16, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Gustau Nacarino

(Editor's Note: language in the last paragraph may be offensive to some readers)

NEW YORK (Reuters)-Carol Bartz, who was fired as CEO of Yahoo Inc last week, resigned from the Board of Directors.

"In September 9, 2011, Carol Bartz resigned from the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc., effective immediately," Charles Sipkins, a spokesman for the Council wrote in an email on Sunday.

The news was reported for the first time on Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

Bartz was abruptly fired from his job as CEO on Tuesday. She had said that she intended to remain in the company's Board of Directors, an Internet statement that came into conflict with that, a company spokesman who said Bartz would have to give up his board seat.

After being fired, Bartz inflammatory gave an interview in which she characterized the Yahoo Board as "doofuses" which "fucked me about" Fortune magazine.

(Reports by Clare Baldwin; Edited by Leslie Adler)

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AOL shares fall; report of detention of Yahoo can

The AOL logo is seen on the exterior of the building housing the corporate headquarters of companies in New York, May 28, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson

NEW YORK | Fri 09/09/2011 4:42 pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters)-investors sent shares of AOL down more than 5% on Friday after conflicting reports about a possible tie-up between AOL and Yahoo.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong would have approached private equity firms to gauge interest in an agreement with Yahoo that would put Armstrong as head of the new company, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Later, CNBC reported that a source close to Yahoo said the company had no interest in an agreement with AOL.

Shares of AOL closed 5.3% to $ 14.72 while Yahoo has moved up 0.3 percent, to $ $14,48.

Yahoo and AOL declined to comment.

Reference analyst Clay Moran said that AOL's investors were probably disappointed that Yahoo was not interested in an agreement.

This is not the first time that reports of a grounding of AOL-Yahoo surfaced. Last year, AOL, once famous for its email services and dial-up tapped Bank of America to explore strategic options, including a possible merger with Yahoo, people familiar with the matter told Reuters at the time.

Yahoo has been embroiled in its own problems, causing the dismissal of its Chief Executive Carol Bartz earlier this week.

(Reporting by Jennifer Saba and Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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Major shareholder of Yahoo calls for new directors

The offices of Yahoo! are portrayed in Santa Monica, California, April 18, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Mario AnzuoniBy Jennifer Saba and Paul Thomasch

NEW YORK | Thu September 8, 2011 6:17 pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters)-activist shareholder Daniel Loeb has picked up shares of Yahoo Inc and is demanding that the company reformulate its Board of Directors, saying that the directors have made "serious mistakes" and "destroyed" value for shareholders.

A "reconstituted Board with new directors who will bring new eyes, experience in relevant industry and investor greater alignment to the table is required immediately," Loeb wrote the Chief Executive of the hedge fund third point LLC, which has about $ 8 billion under management and now owns about 5% of the shares of Yahoo.

In a letter to Yahoo's Board asked the immediate resignation of Loeb's Chairman Roy Bostock and directors Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi and Susan James.

Third point said held discussions with a number of potential replacements for the current administration.

Bostock fired Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz by phone two days ago, less than three months after he expressed support for her during a shareholder meeting.

Third point welcomed Bartz's departure, but said that the Board of Directors, in the final analysis, was responsible for the performance of the company.

"Microsoft sale negotiations failed, the subsequent search agreement with Microsoft, spoiled and disappointing through a series of erroneous CEO selections and more recently the debacle Alipay, failures for this Board destroyed value for all stakeholders of Yahoo," said the letter.

Yahoo's Board said through a spokesman, that recognizes the critical challenges of the company. "In this sense, the welcomes Yahoo board a dialogue about the concerns raised by the third deposit. The Chamber is committed to act in the best interest of shareholders. "

In addition to the Council said that Bartz cannot remain as a Director of Yahoo and is forced to resign his seat.

The fact that the shareholders are starting to move is not surprising given Yahoo's recent woes and stock performance, said Scott Kessler & Standard Poors analyst.

"It was just a matter of time before something like this happened," said Kessler.

Akamai, Kessler pointed out that only one Internet company, is represented on the Board of Yahoo. "If you look at the Board of Directors, it seems to me that you have more people with experience in airlines than you do in Internet companies."

Two decades ago, Yahoo was one of the hottest Internet companies in the world-in January 2000, at the height of the Internet bubble, its stock traded in more than $ 125. Has since been mired in problems as he tries to grabbed their share of online advertising revenue, which is being removed away by larger rivals and more agile, Google and Facebook.

In 2008, Yahoo rejected Microsoft's offer to buy the company for $ 31 per share. Shares of Yahoo closed up 6.1 percent at $ 14.44 in the Nasdaq on Thursday.

Third point said their own analysis values Yahoo in more than $ 20 per share.

The hedge fund said that in four years Yahoo executives were not able to set the company on the right course and that Bartz only aggravated problems of Yahoo, especially when it came to their Asian assets.

The third point letter "poor decision-making skills and communication from Ms. Bartz publicly divested highly respected Asian partners of the company and its shareholders, sell-side analysts, bloggers, customers and employees," he said.

Yahoo is still worth approximately $ 16 billion, with much of what attributed his participation approximately 40 percent of China's Alibaba, the parent company of sites, including Alibaba.com and Taobao. Yahoo, along with the Japanese Softbank Mobile company. own Yahoo Japan.

Yahoo's Bartz relations Alibaba founder Jack Ma had worn recently. In may, Yahoo revealed that Alibaba abruptly had delivered Alipay-one of the Crown jewels of Alibaba-to a company controlled by Ma. Yahoo claimed that it was cheated by the movement.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch and Jennifer Saba; Editing John Wallace)

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