Under the 10-year deal, Yahoo.com and Bing.com will maintain their own branding but search results on Yahoo.com will say "powered by Bing." Yahoo, in turn, will be responsible for attracting premium advertisers.
Will Microsoft Lower Their Bid for Yahoo
SAN FRANCISCO, May 3 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp walked away from its bid to buy Yahoo Inc on Saturday after the Internet company turned down its offer to raise the price by $5 billion to $47.5 billion.Microsoft's offer was for $33 a share but Yahoo would not lower its demand below $37, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said. The software company initially bid $31 per share for Yahoo more than three months ago."We believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal," Ballmer said in a statement.Analysts say Yahoo has overplayed its hand and they expect the Web pioneer's shares to fall as much as 30 percent to $20 levels when Nasdaq trading resumes on Monday. The stock rose nearly 7 percent to $28.67 on Friday on hopes of an agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo."Wow. I'm shocked Yahoo wasn't more reasonable. The stock will probably go down at least $5 on Monday. It is surprising that Ballmer walked away instead of trying a hostile bid at $33," said Walter Price, a senior portfolio manager at RCM fund management company in San Francisco, which had 21 million Microsoft shares and 2 million Yahoo shares as of the end of December.Laura Martin, a senior analyst at Soleil Securities, said she expected a number of shareholder lawsuits against Yahoo."The Yahoo guys want too much money for their company. We think $33 a share is fair in the context of the weakening economic environment and adverse advertising trends," she said. "They've prioritized employees over shareholders in the hopes that someday they can create more than $8 billion of value, even if they have no track record of doing so," she said.Some Wall Street analysts also have said Microsoft could pull its bid as a negotiating strategy aimed at putting pressure on Yahoo to eventually accept a future offer.GOOGLE DEAL NEXT WEEK?Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement the company believed from the beginning that Microsoft's offer undervalued it, and the board was "pleased that so many of our shareholders joined us in expressing that view."He said Yahoo was pursuing "strategic opportunities" but gave no details.Yahoo has courted possible deals with Time Warner Inc's AOL Internet division or News Corp's MySpace online social network, and tested a search advertising partnership with Google Inc. A partnership with Google may be announced as early as next week, a person with knowledge of discussions told Reuters."With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history so that we can maximize our potential to the benefit of our shareholders, employees, partners and users," Yahoo co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang said in a statement.Jordan Rohan, founder of digital media advisory firm Clearmeadow Partners, said Yahoo could name Time Warner as a partner or buy AOL to put a positive spin on the situation, but neither option would give as good a payoff to shareholders."Yahoo management and board overplayed its hand. Shareholders were cheated out of a victory," Rohan said. "I think Yahoo forgot what it felt like to have a share price under $20. They may be reminded soon."Ballmer cited Yahoo's Google plans as one reason Microsoft was walking away rather than mounting a hostile offer."We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a 'hostile' bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo today," Ballmer said in a letter to Yang, made public on Saturday. "In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo undesirable to us."REALLY WALKING?Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo to gain a stronger foothold in its battle with Google, which is expanding rapidly into the software maker's own turf with new Web-based applications.Technology analysts say Microsoft may not really walk away from Yahoo, and Saturday's move could parallel Oracle Corp's strategy in winning over BEA Systems Inc. Oracle pulled its offer in October 2007, leading BEA shares to fall 6 percent. Despite the tough talk, the companies reached an agreement in January this year.Although Microsoft has not succeeded in sealing a deal, tough talk by Ballmer has already brought Yahoo to the negotiating table.According to a person familiar with Microsoft's thinking, Yahoo's advisers said initially it would not negotiate with Microsoft for anything less than $40 a share. But amid threats by Microsoft to launch a hostile takeover, Yang suggested a price of $38 a share, the person said.On Saturday, Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo met Ballmer and Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division President Kevin Johnson in Seattle, where they communicated that Yahoo's board was willing to cut a deal at $37 a share, although the two co-founders remained committed to a dollar more per share, the source said.Price was not the only stumbling block, another person familiar with the discussions said. Microsoft had also failed to respond adequately to antitrust regulatory concerns that Yahoo raised at several meetings, said the source who was not authorized to speak on the record.Yahoo also wanted "value-certainty" assurances the value of Microsoft's offer would remain the same when the deal, if it did get done, closed, the person said.
Nevertheless, Yahoo will begin promoting Amp on Monday with an online video demonstration of a system that the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company promises will make it easier for advertisers to aim their messages at specific demographic groups across scores of Web sites.
With the EnhancedCpc (enhanced cost per click) bid strategy, you set your ad group and keyword bids, and Microsoft Advertising will automatically adjust your bids in real time to increase your chances for a conversion. Your bid will go higher on searches that are more likely to convert and lower on searches less likely to convert (up or down, this change will be made after we apply any bid adjustments you have set). Over the long haul, though, we will try to make sure that your average CPC is not higher than your bid. If you haven't optimized your campaign yet, Enhanced CPC should reduce your cost per conversion and increase your total conversion count while respecting your current budget.
A phrase match results when all of the words in the keyword phrase are present in the user's search term and are in the same order. For example, the keyword phrase "red flower" will match the search term "big red flower" and "red flower", but not "yellow or blue flower" or "flower red".
A broad match results when words in the keyword phrase are present in the user's search term; however, the order of the words can vary. For example, the keyword red flower will match the search term red flower, flower is red, and other variations. It will also match the query red and the query flower.
(AP) -- Yahoo Inc. has pumped up its profits by laying off workers and weeding out unpopular Internet services. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); ); Now Carol Bartz, Yahoo's third chief executive since June 2007, has to figure out how to boost the company's sagging Internet sales - a problem that could become easier to solve if the U.S. economy continues to recover from its worst recession in 70 years.Yahoo's progress and challenges still facing the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company were both evident in third-quarter results released late Tuesday. While the earnings for the July-September period more than tripled from the previous year, revenue slipped by at least 12 percent for the third straight quarter.The revenue rut means Yahoo still has a long way to go on its comeback trail.Investors, though, are betting Yahoo will continue to make strides under the no-nonsense Bartz, who was hired nine months ago to engineer a turnaround. That's something neither Yahoo's two previous CEOs, company co-founder Jerry Yang and former movie studio boss Terry Semel, could pull off.In a sign of Wall Street's faith in Bartz, Yahoo shares gained 87 cents, or 5.1 percent, to $18.04 in extended trading Tuesday. If the stock mirrors that surge in Wednesday's regular trading, it will mark a new 52-week high for the stock. Yahoo shares remain well below a $33-per-share takeover offer that Microsoft Corp. dangled in May 2008, only to withdraw the bid after Yang asked for more money.Bartz indicated she believes her plans are starting to pan out."We had a solid third quarter that signals our major businesses have stabilized," she said in a prepared statement.Yahoo earned $186 million, or 13 cents a share, in the July-September quarter, compared with $54 million, or 4 cents a share, at the same time last year. The average estimate among analysts polled by Thomson Reuters was 7 cents per share.Shedding 2,000 jobs over the past year to reduce Yahoo's payroll to 13,200 employees accounted for some of the improvement. Yahoo also got a one-time lift of $98 million from selling its stake in China's Alibab.com.Revenue for the period fell 12 percent to $1.58 billion, a scant improvement from the first six months of the year when revenue dropped by 13 percent.While Yahoo has been trying to regain its footing, Google Inc. has sprinted further ahead of its older rival. Last week, Google posted the highest profit in its 11-year history in the third quarter as its revenue climbed 7 percent.Google handles about two out of three search requests in the United States while Yahoo processes about one in every five of the queries. The disparity gives Google a big advantage because a huge piece of Internet advertising is tied to search requests.Advertisers also are more likely to increase their spending on search ads because they are relatively inexpensive and typically only cost money when they are clicked on. And Google tends to show more ads that provoke consumer clicks.To help close the gap, Yahoo is turning to Microsoft Corp. to power its search engine in the United States. If regulators approve the alliance, Yahoo plans to transfer at least 400 workers to Microsoft and lay off an unspecified number of other employees in an effort to save more than $400 million annually.Yahoo makes most of its money in display advertising - a niche consisting of online billboards and other more visual messages. Those marketing campaigns tend to require larger, long-term commitments that are unlikely to be made until advertisers see more evidence that the economy is strengthening.2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Citation:Yahoo profits rise in 3Q, will revenue follow? (2009, October 20)retrieved 9 February 2023from -10-yahoo-profits-3q-revenue.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. Explore further 2ff7e9595c
Comments