Yahoo’s efforts to stay free of Microsoft’s clutches may depend on Microsoft. Though Microsoft said it isn’t interested in a takeover of Yahoo, a couple of wealthy investors may think it could happen with the right motivation.

Carl Icahn got the ball rolling by announcing an intention to boot out Yahoo’s board and replace it with his ten-man slate of directors. Icahn purchased millions of shares of Yahoo and lambasted Yahoo’s board for its handling of negotiations with Microsoft.

Bloomberg now notes how another investing giant tagged along for the fun after Icahn picked up those shares. Pickens told CNBC he decided to pick up shares after seeing Icahn’s interest in Yahoo.

The reasons for doing so seem clear. Get Microsoft and Yahoo back to talking about an acquisition, one that likely falls in the $34-$35 per share range, while the big investors pick up a quick profit on the way out the door.

Yahoo and Microsoft have been rumored to be in negotiations regarding Yahoo’s search business. Microsoft covets Yahoo’s search and contextual advertising as it hopes to pry some billions away from market leader Google.

Whether or not the likes of Pickens or Icahn will be satisfied with that is another story. But so far, Silicon Alley Insider believes Icahn made $120 million on paper with his Yahoo buys.

Barring a dramatic turnaround in Yahoo’s fortunes, the company could be ripe for a takeover. A number of big names would love to have Yahoo’s traffic and services.

Among the names listed in the New York Post, AOL, AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Microsoft, Viacom and News Corp have expressed interest. So have private equity firms, salivating at Yahoo’s sub-$24 stock price.

“Jerry Yang and David Filo still don’t want to sell the struggling Internet company, but its stock price is so low that the duo may not be able to fend off a takeover offer without compromising their fiduciary duty to shareholders,” the Post said.

Time is running out for turning things around at Yahoo, which announces Q4 2007 earnings next week. Seeking Alpha said how much time depends “on fourth quarter results, how aggressive the layoffs are and what kind of guidance Yahoo issues to analysts when it reports earnings and holds a conference call with analysts on Jan. 29 to discuss its future plans.”

Rumored layoffs at Yahoo have been claimed to target from 700 to 2,500 people, but actual numbers have not been disclosed. Cuts in underperforming European operations, and possibly in China, may be looming.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-fending-off-takeover-advances-2008-01/feed 2 http://www.webpronews.com/cnet-facing-shareholder-unrest-2008-01 http://www.webpronews.com/cnet-facing-shareholder-unrest-2008-01#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:02:38 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=43088 A New Year’s downgrade of CNet Networks has an activist group of investors calling for big changes with the company.

If the investment group backed by the Jana Partners hedge fund has its way, the directors at CNet will be spending their time at CES in Las Vegas looking for new positions. The stock has languished ever since the dot-com crash at the turn of the century, its most recent 52-week high of $9.88 being less than three dollars away from the low for the same period.

Investors who want change at the top have made themselves known over the past couple of weeks. The group has picked up 21 percent of CNet, and made its demands known in late December 2007.

A Reuters report noted CNet’s third quarter ended with a net loss of $16.6 million. Forbes noted a downgrade by S&P analyst Scott Kessler, from ‘sell’ to ‘strong sell’.

The assessment by JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan cited by Forbes said CNet’s US visitor growth has been half that of the overall US Internet audience:

“We continue to believe that much of the audience for CNET’s core tech vertical is tech savvy and thus already online,” Khan said in a client note. “As such, the rising tide of continued growth in Internet penetration is not likely to significantly raise the tech sites’ audience.”

At Silicon Alley Insider, the prescription for fixing CNet involves paring away the non-technology sites that take away from what should be CNet’s focus:

The CNET brand has nothing to do with “food” and “parenting.” It has everything to do with technology-related stuff: gadgets, gaming, news, reviews, business, etc. (Or at least it did, until CNET management decided to become the next Conde Nast, diluted the brand, and opened the door for TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, et al).

But if cutting back at CNet to its technology core means refocusing on what has been a slow-growth audience segment for the publisher, compared to the overall Internet, how will that help CNet rebound in visits and commensurate value for shareholders?

Yahoo Moving On Up The Stock Charts

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
-- The Boss doing, what else, The Rising

It may be too soon to call it a return to Internet glory, but Yahoo’s recent rise in its fortunes has been glorious. Yesterday’s close of $26.51 represented a 12.38 percent gain over the past month.

That period included a low of $22.52, Yahoo’s price on August 28. After drifting up and down through early September, Yahoo has been gaining nicely through the rest of the month to date.

Forbes cited several reasons contributing to the rise (The rise! Think of it!) of Yahoo:

Yahoo! has benefited from a confluence of events: new partnership deals, value investors looking for bargain-priced stocks and persistent rumors that the company is a takeover candidate.

Investors with an eye on the distant horizon were pleased to see Yahoo! announce a string of advertising-related deals: It bought ad networks Blue Lithium and Right Media, and it struck a new advertising arrangement with social networking company Bebo.

Forbes also cited a slowing tide of executives exiting from Yahoo as a sign of stability. But Yahoo did see a very recent executive departure in early September.

Other important folks below the corporate level have been departing. Valleywag noted the departure of two co-founders of Yahoo Pipes. One of them opted to join Google, and that can’t be a great sign for Yahoo’s idea incubator, Brickhouse.

Maybe it is just the return of takeover chatter, but it would be good for the Internet at large if Yahoo’s fortunes continue to rise. Competition between the major Internet players makes for much better products and services from those companies for their users.

But that won’t happen if those rebel shareholders have their way about it, reports Paul Murphy:

News of Vodafone’s ambitions — with its stubborn commitment to continued growth by acquisition — is likely to flummox critics who have pressed chief executive Arun Sarin to scale back expansion plans and focus instead on cash generation.

Most recently, a growing group of rebel shareholders, including former Marconi boss John Mayo, has pressed for the sale of Vodafone’s 45 per cent holding in Verizon Wireless and the return of cash to investors.

But rest easy all you conspiracy theorists out there, the World Corporate Governance is put off for now. According to Reuters, Vodafone has denied that it has an interest buying Verizon.

New eBay-StumbleUpon Takeover Rumors Surface

It also comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  The mainstream press often runs a little behind in matters of eBusiness, but it still adds a measure of credibility to such stories.  If you didn’t believe that eBay wanted to acquire StumbleUpon, now’s the time to change your mind.

“The potential price for a deal is in the range of $75 million,” the WSJ’s Vauhini Vara and Kevin J. Delaney reported, and that’s a much smaller range than has been previously given.  Yet one of Vara’s and Delaney’s anonymous sources also said that “no final agreement has been reached and the talks could fall apart.”

Yeesh.  That’s supposed to be one of the benefits of using an unnamed source – they don’t have to weigh their words quite as carefully.

Oh, well.  As for identifiable folks within the industry, the majority seemed mildly skeptical of the news.  “So, will it happen this time, or shall I just meet you back here in a month for the next rumor report?” asked Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal.

Om Malik took an even more humorous angle when describing the Wall Street Journal’s article.  “The report doesn’t add any specifics to the nearly three-week-old story,” he wrote, “though one can understand, Rupert Murdoch’s bid might have them a little distracted.”

Stephanie Olsen at Cnet wrote about the likely sale of Friendster, preferably sooner rather than later as MySpace continues to devour the social networking space.

Though no one is commenting on the record, Cnet claimed Friendster has engaged Santa Monica-based Montgomery and Co., an investment banking firm, to help the company find a way out of Web 2.0.

Cnet’s secret source said Friendster wanted $200 million to secure its affections. Now that figure has been lowered dramatically, possibly as low as $50 million.

Blame MySpace for Friendster’s fall from grace. When News Corp grabbed MySpace parent Intermix, it got MySpace’s 33 million users in the deal. MySpace has become a virtual offshoot of the music industry, with notable bands debuting albums there and A&R reps hunting among its listings for new talent.

Friendster has seen its traffic plunge, netting only 585,000 unique visitors in September as the site realigns itself as a dating/personals destination. That’s a heavily-competed space, with big portals like Yahoo and AOL, and dating niche sites like Match, Cupid, and True among a slew of competitors.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp picked up Los Angeles-based Intermix for its new Internet unit, it inherited a dustup between Intermix and the crusading attorney general from New York.

Spitzer’s investigators found that secret adware installs from Intermix were taking place on ten separate web sites.

During the six-month investigation, Spitzer’s office found that the Intermix installs were crafted to be hidden from users; further, the software could not be uninstalled from a Windows machine via the typical Add/Remove Programs function.

Intermix will pay a fine of $7.5 million in settlement of the case. Former CEO Brad Greenspan, who fought the News Corp takeover of Intermix on the grounds the offer undervalued the company, will pay $750,000 in fines, MediaPost reported.

News Corp ultimately purchased Intermix in July for $580 million. The social networking site MySpace was considered key to the deal, as Murdoch seeks to ramp up his company’s place on the Internet in a powerful way.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Now, PepsiCo has denied any plans to do so, and Danone has quickly lost 9% of its market value. Danone seems to at least be glad that the speculation is over.

“This type of information is the only one that can put a stop to the persistent rumours that have fed the speculation on the markets for over two weeks now,” said the company. Tim Hepher and Sudip Kar-Gupta of Reuters write:

In New York, PepsiCo shares eased 0.6 percent to $54.53, valuing the much larger U.S. company at $91 billion.

But French fury at the notion of one of the country’s top companies being swallowed by an emblem of the American way of life provoked a barrage of protests.

“The excitement surrounding Danone shares should ease somewhat in the short term,” said Cyril Freu, an analyst with Ixis Securities. But “Danone remains an attractive target.”

PepsiCo shares fell 0.6% to $54.53 according to Reuters, making the company worth about $91 billion. Danone shares fell to 80.5 euros after reaching 92.65 euros.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.