Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gives birth to twins amid company turmoil

When she announced her pregnancy 40-year-old Mayer, who already has three-year-old son Macallister with her husband Zachary Bogue, said she plans to take a “limited time away” for maternity leave and will be “working throughout”.

Mayer on Wednesday announced that Yahoo will spin off its Internet operations into a separate company in 2016 or 2017 if the company can gain all the required approvals.

On the conference call, Mayer said Yahoo’s board believes its core business “remains very undervalued, and we’re focused on unlocking that value”.

“One of his sayings was my priorities are God, family and the Green Bay Packers, in that order”, she said.

But Yahoo.com still ranks fifth in terms of daily visits, according to monitoring firm Alexa, and this could make it an attractive target for a telecom carrier or private equity. The company just announced plans to spin off its core business, and some have questioned Mayer’s leadership.

And Mark May, the analyst at Citigroup, downgraded Yahoo this morning to a Neutral from a Buy. That process could be even more complicated than the original spinoff and take more than a year before Yahoo shareholders get stock in a newly formed company that has yet to be named. After the distribution, Yahoo will still have an extra $1.3 billion (roughly Rs. 8,685 crores) to finance acquisitions or hire new talent. To avoid a massive tax bill for its Alibaba stake-and, to a lesser degree, rejuvenate its slumping business somehow-Yahoo is splitting itself into two.

Besides overseeing the complex spin-off, the chief executive is also drawing up plans for a cost-cutting overhaul that will see the group shed unprofitable products and possibly lay off hundreds of workers. “In the bigger picture, there’s a growing sense now that part or all of Yahoo will be sold as institutional shareholders put pressure on the board for some sort of transaction that will generate better returns for them”.

Shares in Yahoo rose 0.6% to $35.08 in morning trading in NY.

Yahoo says Mayer may revise plans to pay shareholders billions of dollars from the sale and instead keep the windfall for other spending. Investors have concluded that Yahoo’s Internet business is worth next to nothing, largely because its ad revenue has been sinking for years even though marketers have been steadily increasing their spending on digital campaigns.