Its Yahoo! Week
Final Bids for Yahoo!s core business is this week, July 18th (monday). A decision is expected shortly thereafter.
After the sale of its core business, Yahoo! will become merely a holding company. The big assets on the block are Yahoo! mail, Yahoo! finance, and Yahoo! sports. CEO Marissa Meyer made a big attempt to turn around the company by investing in rebuilding its search engine, boosting its media side (even releasing original TV content with the "Communty" TV show), hiring Katie Couric as global news anchor, and buying a bunch of startup web and phone apps, but none of it seemed to work.
Jeffrey Smith, CEO of activist hedge fund Starboard Value, took an interest in Yahoo! some years ago. Smith cut his teeth on turning around companies. He first turned his father's juice business (before selling it off for a big profit), and later led a hedge fund to oust the entire board of Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden) and helped rebuild profitability by making several big changes to the company.
Smith threatened to seek multiple seats on the Yahoo! board in 2015 unless Marissa Meyer agreed to make spending cuts. She agreed in principle but then broke her word in a last ditch attempt to save Yahoo! Smith then sought and won 4 seats on the Yahoo! board and now is pushing for a sale of core business assets.
The leading potential buyers are Verizon (Who also owns AOL and seeks to leverage Yahoo! assets to make it a big player in the mobile arena on par with Google and Faceook), AT&T (same reasoning), the Daily Mail (they target a similar in the UK and would use Yahoo! to expand its footprint into the US), and even Cleveland Cavaliers owner / Quicken Loans owner Dan Gilbert paired with Warren Buffet (Gilbert has an idea of making Detroit the financial / tech capital of the world).
http://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2016/ ... -the-wire/
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/dan-gilbe ... 53568.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara ... 6a774a649b
I often joke that THE market top for this 8 year run will be when someone buys Yahoo! And here we are, at an all time high and Yahoo! is about to be sold!