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Yahoo Corporate Governance in Microsoft Takeover

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Yahoo Corporate Governance and the Microsoft Takeover We are studying the potential buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft from the perspective of Yahoo’s Board of Directors. Yahoo! Inc. provides Internet services to users, advertisers, publishers and developers worldwide. It offers online properties and services to users; and marketing solutions and tools to advertisers and publishers. For example, Yahoo! Finance is a portal for information on general financial conditions and specific firm information. It is also the second largest internet search engine on the planet, behind Google, which is also their main competitor. Jerry Yang, 39, is Co-Founder, CEO, Chief Yahoo! and Executive Director and Susan L. Decker, 45, is President. Yahoo!, a …show more content…

For the past few years, Microsoft Corporation, the software behemoth located in Redmond Washington, has been looking to acquire Yahoo!, Inc. While Microsoft Corp. has numerous reasons to be interested in acquiring Yahoo!, there are few options available for Yahoo! Inc. Like Google’s purchase of Double-Click in 2007, Microsoft sees Yahoo! as a way to extract internet advertising revenue. Further, Microsoft has for years sought to build a winning portal that could dominate the search engine market, currently dominated by Google. MSN was Microsoft’s version of AOL. Even after years of Research &Development in this area, Microsoft still only has 19% of the internet search engine market (and that’s because of ISP bundling and desktop default presets.) Actual search engine use of MSN is much lower than 19%. Google is a money-maker and has a dominating market share. Beyond the search engine market, there also is that “innovation” nirvana for which Microsoft is always searching. It wasn’t Hotmail, it wasn’t MSN maps, it wasn’t SoapBox, and the list of Microsoft Corp. disappointments goes on. Now they decided to go for a big acquisition. Microsoft’s original unsolicited offer of $44.6 billion for a complete buyout of Yahoo! Was rejected by Yahoo!’s board. Microsoft has continued to revise their bids, increasing it to $47.5B to no avail. This initial bid was $31 per share a 62% premium for

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