
I expected a bigger price-drop...
...than $350m. Verizon obviously see more in Yahoo! than I do.
I wonder if there are any more Yahoo! data breaches to look forward to? Surely just a matter of time?
Yahoo! will be gobbled by Verizon for $4.48bn, $350m cheaper than the initial deal, apparently due to the damage done to the company's value by widely reported successful cyber-attacks. Verizon slashed its acquisition offer in the wake of Yahoo! confessing to cyber-attacks, and the companies will now share the liability for …
If the mail freeloaders are all like me (I had half a dozen or so Yahoo email accounts and haven't used any of them for several years now) then Verizon are buying something that is long since dead and buried. Haven't used Yahoo search for nearly twenty years and as for their news and other websites - do they still exist?
Back in 2008 Microsoft offered roughly $45B to buy Yahoo, 62% over market value. Half in cash, half in MS shares. Since MS shares rose roughly 3 times in 9 years since, the offer if taken would be worth more than $80B today.
Yahoo share price in 2008 was $20, today it's $45.
Yahoo market cap today is $43B.
So, how come the sale to Verizon for 10% of market cap is a good deal?
What am I missing here?
The value of the deal to shareholders is twenty times less than the deal from MS they declined in 2008...
Hope the shareholders are happy for declining to sell to MS back then :-)
>What am I missing here?
That various shareholdings in Asia are not part of the sale and account for most of Yahoo's market cap
In fact, for quite a while, the shareholdings in Asia (Alibaba & Yahoo Japan) were worth more than Yahoo! 's market cap. Verizon is paying over $4bn for something which the market considers to have a negative value.
The only reason this makes sense is that there is a tax issue stopping Yahoo! from selling off all their Asian holdings and giving the cash straight to their shareholders. They wanted to do it, but the IRS warned they might be taxed, so they decided to sell Yahoo! proper instead.
Many comments about Yahoo remind me about the characters mentioned in the subject.
Yahoo was attacked by a state party. Given the world wide presence of Yahoo, it will probably be a repressive and nosy regime who did this. It is an unequal battle if a state starts attacking a company, its resources exceeds those of most companies by large.
Still using yahoo, anyone can, and ultimately will, experience information leaks at some point in time.