In the first half of 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion to purchase Yahoo. At one point, Microsoft raised the buyout offer by another $5 billion However, in the end Yahoo rejected the offer from Microsoft, saying that it undervalued the company. The deal fell apart just a few months before the stock market crashed and the Great Recession began. Now Yahoo's stock is worth about half what it was in 2008.
In hindsight, Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer now admits that having the deal with Yahoo collapse was a good thing in the end. Business Insider reports that Ballmer, speaking at the Web 2.0 conference on Tuesday, said, "Ask any CEO who might have bought something before the market crashed....Hallelujah. Putting everything else aside, the market fell apart....Sometimes, you're lucky." Microsoft did strike a deal with Yahoo in 2009 to provide search results for Yahoo's web site powered by Microsoft's Bing technology.
Ballmer's remarks came on the same day that Yahoo revealed its quarterly financial results for the three months that ended on September 30. Yahoo's net revenue was $1.07 billion for the quarter, a five percent drop from the same period a year ago. However those results actually beat expectations from financial analysts and as a result Yahoo's stock price went up in after hours trading. The company, which fired its CEO Carol Bartz in September, is rumored to be considering a number of options to sell Yahoo, or at least parts of it. Yahoo is also rumored to be considering the possibility of taking the company private.
10 Comments - Add comment