Microsoft's Potential Yahoo Buy Could Lose Alibaba

Text:

| Print

| Share:

10 commentsFriday, March 28, 2008

Microsoft's Potential Yahoo Buy Could Lose Alibaba

Chinese asset could remove itself from the deal under new law

By WebProNews Staff

Jerry Yang thinks Alibaba represents part of the growth Yahoo will enjoy over the next two years, but it may not be so if Microsoft acquires Yahoo.

The reason for concern comes from a forthcoming antitrust law being enacted on August 1st in China. Like the US FTC and the EU Competition Commission, China will review company mergers for possible monopolistic shenanigans.

With that law comes the possibility Alibaba jumps ship if Microsoft takes over Yahoo, which holds a 40 percent stake in the business. Yahoo purchased that stake for a billion dollars in 2005.

The New York Times said the thinking at Jack Ma's Alibaba concerns the potential of buying back its Yahoo stake should the takeover happen. China's new law apparently could enable this; neither Yahoo nor Microsoft is talking about it.

With Alibaba at stake, Microsoft won't be inclined to boost its offer for Yahoo; why pay more when such a valuable asset could vanish due to Chinese regulatory activity?

Imagine what could happen to Yahoo's stock if Microsoft decides they want to walk away from the Yahoo deal, if Alibaba's presence can't be part of it. That would set the stage for a lot more lawsuits against Yahoo for saying 'no' to Microsoft, as Yahoo stock only rose in value with the disclosure of Microsoft's takeover interest.

News Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Alibaba, Deals, China

By Pakistan Business Man (WPN reader) - Sat, 03/29/2008 - 15:40

Microsoft is going to have a hard time competing

The thing is, with just about the entire world reaching for google when searching, what is Microsoft actually going to accomplish by buying Yahoo.

I mean they say that they are bringing in richer and deeper results, but quite a few times when I searched their Live search, knowing something was there, their search engine couldn't output the results.

Google on the contrary took less then a second, and boom, I remembered the name of the sites which I was trying to find.

Now in the midst of this, what happens if some genius from MIT or Carnegie, comes up with their own version of a relational search algorithm, where are we then.

IMO, Yahoo doesn't want to sell and Yang could say heck with it, we'll run Yahoo the way it's going, but were not going to sell.

Who knows.

By Hyena Cialis (WPN reader) - Sun, 03/30/2008 - 07:24