Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gives birth to twins

The end result would be two separate, publicly traded companies. To help unlock the value of the underlying business – the Internet portal – Yahoo is considering a plan to spin-off its core business.

A former Google executive and an engineer, Mayer, now in her fourth year as Yahoo’s CEO, has been under fire for the firm’s declining revenue growth. Yahoo appears – to borrow a baseball analogy – to be on the way to going, going, gone, and not in the home-run sense of the term.

Verizon purchased AOL for $4.4 billion, as reported by Forbes.

Mayer indeed has a lot of things to face aside from her newborn girls – she still has a big company to lead back into reversing its current decline. Mayer, beleaguered as she may be, has not gotten the ax-yet. In the backdrop, Yahoo also has had to ward off a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft Corp. and quell shareholder uprisings spearheaded by activist investors Carl Icahn and Daniel Loeb.

Mayer posted the news on Twitter and on the Yahoo-owned blogging platform Tumblr with husband Zach Bogue.

And Mark May, the analyst at Citigroup, downgraded Yahoo this morning to a Neutral from a Buy. What is actually happening? Yahoo later sold down that stake, netting billions of dollars in profits.

The decision is the opposite of the strategy announced in January to spin off its 15% stake in Alibaba. It came a day after unveiling plans to create a new company to control Yahoo’s internet business.

“The move was necessitated by uncertainty over the tax implications of the Alibaba spinoff”.

The spinoff is finally happening, but not in the way it was first announced. “But would they be willing to pay a high enough price to get Yahoo to be willing to sell?” Considering that the worst-case tax bill for Aabaco would have been .3 billion, the cool response from the IRS made Yahoo investors sweat.

While analysts estimate that the Web operations could fetch $3 billion to $3.5 billion in an acquisition, Mayer’s goal has been to make it an even more attractive destination for users and advertisers.

Mind you, the newly proposed spinoff will not change anything for consumers. I am among the many analysts who believe Mayer simply arrived too late to construct a viable turnaround. However, Yahoo’s board believes that there is a marked difference between what the value of its Internet business might be.

“I remain convinced that Yahoo is on a better path and the right one”, Mayer said.

Yahoo, for its part, is generous to new moms, giving a maternity leave that can be as long as 16 weeks.