Yahoo board to weigh future of company, Marissa Mayer

With Mayer as CEO, Yahoo bought Tumblr and a number of other, lesser-known companies and worked on improving its mobile apps, but it is still struggling to grow the business.

A giant of the world wide web in the 1990s, Yahoo’s internet business has fallen into a seemingly-terminal decline, with this year’s profits expected to be half those of 2012 when Ms Mayer joined.

The board may be considering her future with the company at these meetings. Starboard has also suggested it retain Yahoo Japan, a successful joint venture with Japan’s Softbank.

Cowen & Co. analysts estimated that Yahoo’s core search and display advertising business was worth $3.84 billion, while Pivotal Research Group valued it at just $1.9 billion.

Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion (£30 billion) way back in 2008, but Yahoo refused to sell. Mayer is facing renewed pressure from activist investor Starboard Value, which last month threatened a proxy fight if she doesn’t make drastic changes to her plans, including selling the main search and display advertising businesses. Yahoo was once one of the biggest internet sites, but fell out of favour after failing to keep up with consumer trends.

As previously reported, Yahoo is said to be having meetings this week about the possibility of selling off its core business and/or getting more out of its stake in Alibaba Group Holding.

The obvious candidates to purchase Yahoo’s internet business include telecommunications and media companies as well as private equity firms. “Yahoo is the only Silicon Valley company we know that now has a stock price nearly entirely driven by the value of an entity outside of its control”, the letter reads.

“I’m happy about any sort of capital allocation decision that gets the decision out ofMarissa Mayer’s hands”, Strauss said of Yahoo’s beleaguered CEO. In October, Yahoo said it would update shareholders with a strategic plan for the post-Alibaba era during its next earnings call, expected next month.

Core Internet business? Isn’t that basically the whole Yahoo show? This came in to involve the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and spoil the party by dismissing it as a tax-free transaction. A source familiar with Verizon’s thinking said now there were no talks between the companies.

“The company, once the first stop for many brands when spending ad budgets online, has been eclipsed by Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.”, reported TheWSJ.