Welcome!

iPhone Authors: Federica Schiassi, Kevin Benedict, Ian Thain, Scott McKain, Andrew Mathew

Related Topics: Search, .NET

Search: Article

Microsoft-Yahoo! - Microsoft Threatens To Walk

Microsoft could walk away completely, a move that will send Yahoo! stock back to the teens
By Maureen O'Gara
Article Rating:
April 24, 2008 02:15 PM EDT
Reads:
 5,702
Time is running out on Microsoft’s deal-or-else ultimatum to Yahoo! Basically Yahoo! has to move off the dime by Saturday or else Microsoft could try taking the place by force, lowering its rejected $31-a-share bid in the process or – scarier still for Yahoo! – Microsoft could walk away completely, a move that will send Yahoo! stock back to the teens and could be the undoing of Yahoo!'s desperate CEO Jerry Yang.

Microsoft was unmoved by the slightly better-than-expected results Yahoo posted Tuesday – and Yang’s claim that the numbers prove Yahoo is worth more – to offer more money. It said it would stick by its price.

“We know what Yahoo!’s worth; $44 billion is a lot of money,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (pictured) said at a conference in Milan on Wednesday.

He also said that Microsoft “is prepared to move forward alone without Yahoo!.”

“Time is money,” he said later. “We made [that] clear in the last letter we sent,” meaning his ultimatum.

Analysts think Ballmer is merely posturing. They also tend to think that Yahoo! is unlikely to get much of a sweetener out of Redmond, maybe a dollar or two a share.

In its ultimatum three weeks ago, Ballmer told Yahoo that he was prepared to wage a proxy fight to unseat its board, an effort that could take a long time and give Google the liberty to forge ahead.

Yahoo!’s earnings were flat with last year except for a windfall one-time non-cash gain of $401 million stemming its stake in the parent company of Alibaba.com, the big Chinese e-commerce site that went public late last year.

Revenues in the quarter were up 9% to $1.82 billion, $1.35 billion, if you subtract the commissions it pays to partners. Funny number that. Google earned $1.3 billion in Q1.

Yahoo! left its disappointing 2008 revenue prediction unchanged at $7.2 billion-$8 billion.

Published April 24, 2008 – Reads 5,702
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.