You may not think that I follow stocks that much, mainly because I never really talk about them on the blog, but I do follow the big players, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Sony, Microsoft etc. Things haven’t been looking good at all for Yahoo. Their Q4 earnings were down 23 percent and their stock has been going down since November. Yahoo also announced that they would be laying off 1000 employees to restructure the company. I know there have been talks before about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, but with all of the recent troubles Yahoo has been in it seems it was a perfect time for Microsoft to put out an offer before it’s too late to save Yahoo. The offer went out January 31st for a whopping 44.6 Billion. Here is my take on the offer…
Honestly I think it would be great of Microsoft acquires Yahoo. Microsoft’s adCenter and Yahoo’s Publisher Network are really not any competition for Google Adsense, but if you combine the two there could be something there. Adsense has no competition, they have already screwed us and just recently they have lowered affiliate payouts and commission payouts on their products. You would not see these things happening if there was someone out there to compete with them. If Google and Yahoo do combine and make a decent ad serving platform it will be interesting to see how well it performs.
It will also be interesting to see if Microsoft would combine MSN.com with the Yahoo home page or keep them separated. There are so many other things to consider when you think about the deal, but we won’t go into that. The 44.6 Billion that was offered was $11 more per share than what the stock was at yesterday ($19), but it looks like it will likely open today at around $28. Of course the stock is up because of the offer, but that puts Microsoft’s offer almost on par.
If Microsoft does acquire Yahoo it will be one of the biggest deals of our time. If you want to see Microsoft’s letter to the Yahoo board you can check it out here. It will be very interesting to see how this all pans out, what are your thoughts?