Times are looking tough for current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and the company as a whole. A Reuters report now claims, that the once dominant internet giant is considering a sale of its internet business, which forms the core part of its operations. The company is speculated to decide on the decision in a board meeting scheduled for later this week.
Yahoo’s internet business includes its popular services such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News and a few sports sites owned by the company. If the company does decide to go ahead with this decision, it could well be one of the biggest announcements of the year, which would attract major firms from various sectors for the buyout process.
Every moment heading up towards the meeting is being watched closely by analysts, industry experts and the media as this could turn out to be the final nail in the coffin for the tenure of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO. In a more updated story, stocks have seen decent rise with the news breaking out.
Mayer’s future has been surrounded in uncertainty following the criticism showered on her tenure as the Chief Executive. If the board decides to opt for the sale of its core internet business, then the shockwaves of this decision could topple Mayer position within the company. Mayer’s jump from Google to Yahoo was a game changer for the latter.
But as time passed by, the strategies she implanted to increase Yahoo’s dwindling revenues failed to stand up in the face of competition put up by Google and Facebook, which have managed to continually increase their advertising revenue. Yahoo’s last bet on the native and social media ads also failed to generate substantial profits for the company as Mayer’s position began to wobble.
Mayer is also blamed by experts for Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr for a whopping $1.1 billion in 2013. The investment proved to be a failure in terms of revenue, even though it helped Yahoo reach a user base of close to 1 billion — among the closest a company has ever got to Facebook.
Speculations are also pretty high on Yahoo’s selling of its stake in Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba — which amount to a whopping $30Bn. It had earlier decided to do the same in September, but the plans failed to take off as US Internal Revenue Service stood firm and refused to grant Yahoo the permission to carry out the deal as tax-free.
As of now, Yahoo is the third largest web search engine in the US, in a chart where it is preceded by Bing and led by Google. Yahoo holds a market share of 12.8%, while Google has the lion’s share at 64.5%, followed by Bing at 19.8%.
