Gentlemen, start your litigators!
May. 3rd, 2008 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoFrom the original article in the New York Times on Microsoft's offer for Yahoo:
"The offer of $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price of $19.18 on Thursday, a far cry from its peak of $118.75 right before the dot-com bubble crash."
Microsoft has since increased its offer to $33/share, a premium of 72% on the original share price at Yahoo.
Yahoo's board has always maintained that MSFT's offer was "undervalued," and repeatedly refused it. In what universe they thought making $1.72 on every $1.00 invested was "undervalued" was never explained.
Today, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid. Rightly so, in my opinion.
The next act: Watching Yahoo's board have their pants justifiably sued off by shareholders who'll never see so good an offer again. This may be the stupidest bunch of managers since Coke's "reformulation." (Or any member company of the RIAA.)
"The offer of $31 a share represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s closing stock price of $19.18 on Thursday, a far cry from its peak of $118.75 right before the dot-com bubble crash."
Microsoft has since increased its offer to $33/share, a premium of 72% on the original share price at Yahoo.
Yahoo's board has always maintained that MSFT's offer was "undervalued," and repeatedly refused it. In what universe they thought making $1.72 on every $1.00 invested was "undervalued" was never explained.
Today, Microsoft has withdrawn its bid. Rightly so, in my opinion.
The next act: Watching Yahoo's board have their pants justifiably sued off by shareholders who'll never see so good an offer again. This may be the stupidest bunch of managers since Coke's "reformulation." (Or any member company of the RIAA.)
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-04 07:35 am (UTC)Anybody who bought YHOO higher than that probably thinks YHOO actually has a business, and I sure can't see how that business is improved by being combined with Microsoft.
I'm sure there will be lawsuits; I wish they wouldn't.
Lin and I own some Microsoft; we used to own Yahoo! bought after the crash, but sold it off a while ago. We still have friends working at Yahoo!.
I didn't think this deal was a good idea for either side; when I saw that MSFT had given up on this, I was relieved.
"Recent"
Date: 2008-05-04 07:04 pm (UTC)The bid is higher than Yahoo's price since about Dec 2005. 30 months strikes me as a bit more than "recent." (At least in the wacky world of stocks.)
The actual bottom for Yahoo was about Sep 2002, when it traded in the $4 range.
So about the only way one can hold that the bid is "undervalued" is to say the market as a whole undervalues the company... and that's just pissing in the wind, practically speaking.