That’s Not Yodeling You Hear, It’s Yawning
Oh, happy day! Another letter from Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang!
Yawn …
With its Aug. 1 shareholder meeting fast approaching, Yahoo’s (YHOO) leadership is doing all it can to rally support for its incumbent board of directors. Hence today’s paean to redundancy, which argues once again, and in mind-numbing detail, why the company believes stockholders should beware the “Icahn-Microsoft agenda.”
“Carl Icahn bought his stock two months ago for an estimated average cost of less than $25 per share,” Bostock and Yang wrote. “He is well-known as a corporate agitator with a short-term approach to his investments. … His short-term approach gives Mr. Icahn a strong incentive to strike any deal with Microsoft (MSFT) that enables him to recover his investment and get back his money quickly, even a deal that does not provide full and fair value to you. Is that in the interests of all stockholders? Clearly, it is not.”
The pair offered an equally caustic opinion of investor Microsoft and its intentions.
“Microsoft’s flip-flops and inconsistencies over the past five months are so stupefying that one can only conclude that Microsoft was never fully committed to acquiring Yahoo,” Bostock and Yang wrote. They argued that “Microsoft is more interested in destabilizing a key competitor so that it can either enhance its competitive position or buy our highly valuable search business–and the enormously desirable intellectual property associated with it–at a bargain-basement price.”
Yahoo, says the pair, would much prefer to “sell the entire Company to Microsoft for $33 per share or more if Microsoft will negotiate a transaction that delivers certainty of value and certainty of closing.”
$33 per share? Isn’t that exactly the offer that was refused by Yahoo in early June?
