The New York Times sends an alert:
Microsoft Offers to Buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion
NEW YORK, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Friday hat it had offered to acquire Yahoo Inc. in a proposed cash nd stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.
Microsoft said that it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per hare, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above he company’s closing stock price on Nasdaq on Thursday.
Reuters quotes Steve Balmer, as saying: “We have great respect for Yahoo, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,”
It’s too early to say anything about the positives and negatives of the deal. Expect hectic web activity in the coming days!
The competition regulators in the US and Europe might shoot it down. Also, Microsoft hasnt endeared itself to the regulators in either continents.
Anyway, stranger things have happened in business.
Yahoo won’t sell! It is in a rapidly growing market and holds few of the hottest WWW properties - Y! Mail and Answers….not to mention Messenger & Flickr!
If I were Yahoo Exec. Board, I’d hive off add-ons such as 360, Tech, Geocities, Video and the like.
P.S: that/and/share/the are the mishtakes up there. Correct that and delete this comment
This would really help Yahoo! which really hasn’t got much to offer. I would suggest Yahoo! to accept the proposal as the deal seems a good one.
This is a great deal. But, I don’t think this would happen.
I’m convinced no one but shareholders have something to win from Micro$soft-Yahoo! merge.
This is really a bad news for the web & for Yahoo! employees (many of them will be “sacrified” in the name of
“eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs”)
;o(
Yahoo is suffering losses right now. But handing over reins to Microsoft isn’t the right thing for anybody, not even Microsoft!
Even if the merger goes thru, i believe the real winner will be Google. The integration and cultural issues between MS and Yahoo will bog down the merger.
Anyway, big bang mergers were never supposed to work. Case in example AOL-Netscape, Compaq-Digital etc.
Considering that Google is raking up all sorts of issues against the merger, I think the merger could well become a reality. But MS and Y! compete on so many fronts, what will happen to those products / services? That said, Y! needs a major overhaul, not sure MS is the right choice though.