Yang Out at Yahoo!
No surprise here . . .
Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang will step down, following his failure to negotiate a takeover by Microsoft Corp. and broker an online advertising agreement with Google Inc.
Yahoo is searching for a new CEO, the company said today in a statement. Yang, 40, will continue to serve on the board. He took the top job at the 13-year-old Internet company in June 2007, promising to win back users and advertisers lost to market leader Google.
The move signals that the board may seek a new offer from Microsoft, which bid $47.5 billion for Yahoo this year. Shareholders criticized Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo for seeking a higher price while Yahoo’s sales growth and profits continued to drop. The stock has lost about 60 percent since Yang took over.
Yahoo investors withheld one third of their votes for Yang’s re-election to the board in August. He sidestepped a proxy fight with Carl Icahn, agreeing to give the billionaire investor three slots on the board. Yahoo’s net sales growth dwindled to 3 percent last quarter from 14 percent a year earlier. Profit has dropped in 10 of the past 11 quarters.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, fell 19 cents to $10.63 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.
Ten bucks! Can you believe it?
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Sources:
Yang to Step Down After Microsoft, Google Deals Fail
Crayton Harrison
Bloomberg, Nov. 17 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=alQDH2gdjsKc&
Jerry Yang steps aside as Yahoo seeks new CEO; Embattled CEO to remain as board member, resume ‘Chief Yahoo’ role
John Letzing
MarketWatch 8:34 p.m. EST Nov. 17, 2008
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/yang-step-down-yahoo-ceo/story.aspx?guid={BB8DBF8D-F9AF-4B0F-AD43-98846BA7B08E}&
Jerry Yang Set to Step Down as Yahoo CEO
JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
TECHNOLOGYNOVEMBER 17, 2008, 9:12 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122697024336935679.html
November 17th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
They need a dealmaker as their next CEO – screw strategy. The only strategy should be “make a deal.”
November 17th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
The Yahoo situation is a real enigma to me. With all the millions of eyeballs they have, their inability to capitalize on it must be the result of inept management; I can’t imagine any other explanation. I mean how can Google be worth $94.4 and Yahoo only $14.7B?
November 17th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
It took a 67% drop in the stock price (from the $33 offer price) for the Yahoo board to finally wake up. Better late than never, I guess.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Sort of Nice Symmetry to all this….come up with some cool new technology…ride a bubble all the way up and then all the way back down. What a joke.
Hey smart guys at Google…you watching this?
Creative Destruction….love it.
- AT
November 17th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Just think of all the money Jerry pissed away…… he could have sold and had it made in the shade.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
This ship is going down… I don’t see a deal and no new CEO will be able to make a difference in the next 12 months.
- LB
November 17th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Steve Ballmer must thank his lucky stars every single night…”Thank you Jerry Yang…thank you….you really saved my own company with your Gollum-like obsession over your ‘precious’ stock.”
November 17th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Good riddance. What a Yahoo.
……..sorry.
November 17th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
If I were CEO of Yahoo!, I could create a $100 stock in 18 months. …Google too.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:46 am
ok, I guess I should be proactive about this … if I’m eventually going to have to replace the spreadsheet macros that pull stock quotes from Yahoo! …. anybody have a favorite site to point spreadsheets at to get quotes? It needs to support ETFs, ETNs, options, and some foreign stocks, as well as the normal contingent of domestic stock quotes.
‘Cause it’s pretty obvious that given the difficult economy, and the fact that Google overlaps Yahoo’s markets very effectively, this is probably the last Christmas that Yahoo is gonna see. There really isn’t a need for both of them.
I do wish that Google would provide interfaces to programmatically interact with their quotes feed, miserable though it is.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:01 am
Constantnormal – Yahoo! is sitting on the ultimate social network. It just needs new management to shake off the legacy. Shareholders couldn’t lose at this point. Yang out means buy Yahoo!. They should hire me.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Just fix the message boards….PLEASE! For the love of mercy fix the yahoo message boards!
November 18th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
“Ten bucks! Can you believe it?”
No I-Banker worth her salt could in any way justify paying anything more than mid single digits for Yahoo stock, and I defy any equity analyst any where to present a cogent explanation that justifies a mature Internet company beind destroyed by Google and others being worth 36x earnings.
What has happened, is that on one hand, you have a techy guy running rough-shod over his finance department, only to have the board ultimately say “NFW” in no uncertain terms, and on the other, institutional shareholders who’ve forgotten that GARP doesn’t involve investing in non-dividend paying, high P/B, high P/E low cash-flow companies that are destined for the status of also-ran within a decade, and probably much sooner.
Posted by: Byno | May 13, 2008 5:04:50 PM
What do I win?