Several sources mention that at $31 a share, Yahoo feels Microsoft’s bid undervalues the company…
“Google Inc. offered help to Yahoo Inc. in an effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited 44.6 billion dollars bid for Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Sunday…
San Francisco — Yahoo Inc. would consider a business alliance with Google Inc. as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said on Sunday.
“The latest murmur indicates Yahoo management might get back to discussing its next move with Google, as it did several months ago, aiming for a possible alliance between the two.”
Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft’s bid, that source said. At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said.
“According to the U.S. paper, Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang with the proposal.”
Yahoo may solicit bids from Google Inc., Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Comcast Corp., according to Stanford Group Co.’s Clayton Moran in Boca Raton, Florida. Other analysts say the company may try to form a partnership with a social-networking site like News Corp.’s MySpace.
Finding a better bid or alliance might help Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang regain the confidence of investors, who pushed the stock up the most in more than a decade after Microsoft made the offer Feb. 1. Microsoft has said Yahoo executives rejected advances last year in favor of tackling Internet search leader Google on their own.
“Yahoo is going to explore their alternatives and talk to as many other potential suitors as possible,” Moran said. “It will be more of a ploy than anything else, because I highly doubt that those companies will be able to top Microsoft.” The company’s attempts may still yield a higher offer from Microsoft, which could afford to pay as much as $35 a share, Moran said.
“With the approach from Google, the Yahoo takeover bid has developed into an all-out battle between the two IT powerhouses.”
A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing.
In a memo to Yahoo employees on Friday, which was obtained by Reuters on Sunday, Yahoo leaders wrote: “We want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made — and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there is certainly no integration process underway.”
Representatives at Google and Philadelphia-based cable operator Comcast declined to comment. Teri Everett, a spokeswoman for News Corp. in New York, also declined to comment.
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called Yang to suggest a potential partnership between the two companies to thwart Microsoft’s bid, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
“Yahoo has a lot of options, and you can look at what analysts have said about those options,” spokeswoman Diana Wong said when asked about the Journal’s report. Yahoo said in a statement last week that it will review the offer “promptly.”
Spokesmen for Yahoo and Google declined comment. Google was not immediately available for comment on the WSJ story.
Yahoo’s efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday.
Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote in a research note that “the Microsoft bid of $31 is very astute” because it puts pressure on Yahoo management to take actions that could unlock the underlying value of Yahoo assets, which he estimates are worth upward of $39-$45 a share.
Microsoft’s $31-a-share bid came three days after Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo posted an eighth straight quarter of declining profit and projected sales that trailed most analysts’ estimates.
The bid gave a boost to markets in Asia when they opened on Monday. Shares in Softbank Corp soared as much as 16 percent and Yahoo Japan was un-traded due to a flood of buy orders on Monday, on hopes a potential deal between Microsoft and Yahoo would boost the Japanese firms’ competitiveness.
“Softbank holds a 3.9 percent stake in Yahoo Inc., in terms of voting rights.”
Yahoo was trading at $19.18 before the offer. The shares rose 48 percent in Nasdaq Stock Market trading on Feb. 1 and advanced 95 cents to $29.33 at 4 p.m. New York time, Microsoft fell 26 cents to $30.19, while Google dropped $20.47 to $495.43.
Microsoft chose Yahoo as a partner after repeatedly coming in a distant third in Internet searches and failing to bolster advertising revenue on its own. Yahoo would give Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft the most popular group of Web sites in the U.S., which reach about 500 million people worldwide.
“It is hard to look shareholders in the eye and say it does not make sense,” Robert Doll, chief investment officer of global equities at BlackRock Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey, said of Microsoft’s unsolicited offer. “There would not be a whole lot of options for Yahoo.”
“He oversees $1.3 trillion in assets, including stock in Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker.”
Yang, 39, agreed to take over at Yahoo in June, replacing Terry Semel, after its share of Web searches tumbled and the company lost out on sales of graphics-based ads mainly to social-networking sites like News Corp.’s MySpace and Facebook Inc.
Former employees such as Brian Steel, who joined Yahoo in 2003 with the acquisition of Overture Services Inc., say Yang probably will take Microsoft’s offer because the price is too good to ignore.
“At the end of the day, he is got a fiduciary responsibility to a whole bunch of folks,” said Steel, who left in 2006 and later became chief of VoloMedia Inc. in Mountain View.
Through its merger with Yahoo, Microsoft is apparently set to challenge Google’s dominance in Internet search services and advertising.
“Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo certainly poses a serious threat to Google’s business.”