Marissa Mayer’s possible swan song doesn’t change Yahoo’s tune — MarketWatch First Take

Yahoo began preparations for a sale four months ago.

(Oppenheimer & Co. make a market in the securities of Yahoo.) He said Yahoo would be smart to argue that its restructuring cut costs and helped them perform better than expected, perhaps driving up its sale price. There have been potential buyers eyeing Yahoo.

SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Internet equity analyst Robert Peck also expects a sale to happen, but he downgraded Yahoo to Neutral and lowered his target to $42 from $44 based on the deal’s complexity.

Marissa Mayer may be ending her tenure at Yahoo on a sour note.

If not for the charges and the accounting moves, the earnings report might not look so bad.

Revenue from Yahoo’s financial metric called Mavens – which tracks mobile, video, native and social ads – rose 26% to $504 million.

The company could be sold off in the next couple weeks, as final bids are reportedly being mulled.

Mayer also inherited a company that was in transition and struggling to figure out what it should be in 2012.

While revenue from Mavens has grown to $1.6 billion in the past year, Mavens revenue only grew seven percent in the first quarter of this year, compared to 58 percent growth in the first quarter of 2015.

Yahoo’s recent financial performance is not expected to drive the bidding upward.

Revenue minus the cost of traffic acquisition was $842 million, beating estimates of $836.8 million.

The last decade has not been good for the $36 billion company, as it lost a lot of advertising revenue and search traffic to rivals. “As I’ve said before, our plan complements the strategic alternatives process is important to maximize the value of Yahoo in any scenario”. But it hasn’t been able to hold onto that glory as rivals including Google, Facebook and even younger companies like Snapchat have won over users. Verizon and AT&T, both bidders in the war to buy Yahoo, earn $185,637 and $144,319 per person, respectively.

At the end of the quarter, Yahoo had about full-time 8,800 employees, reaching its goal of cutting 15% of its workforce, down from about 11,000 in the second quarter of 2015.

In the second quarter, Yahoo’s revenue was $1.31 billion, up from $1.24 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Instead of a turnaround, most of the excitement around owning Yahoo’s shares has been the company’s large stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. There was criticism early on that the company was just going through the motions and not really looking for a buyer, though Mayer denied that.

Andrew Frank, research vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, said that the numbers shouldn’t scare off investors, who would likely be more interested in Yahoo’s media footprint.