The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) just broke the story that Yahoo’s board plans to reject Microsoft $44.6 billion offer, citing our favorite source: “a person familiar with the situation.” Apparently, $31 per share “massively undervalues” Yahoo, according to the same source. The logic is that the offer doesn’t take into account risks Yahoo would go through (that is, if regulators overturned the deal) by entering into an agreement with Microsoft.
Accordingly, Yahoo’s board will send a letter to Microsoft on Monday explaining the situation. This article comes just hours after another WSJ article quotes several investment bankers who basically say that “investors have lost confidence in Yahoo management’s ability to reverse the company’s fortunes on its own.” Nevertheless, here’s Yahoo’s reasoning for rejecting the offer:
- Yahoo thinks Microsoft is trying to take advantage of Yahoo’s weak stock price and is saying that Microsoft wants to “steal” the company.
- Yahoo board members won’t consider offers below $40 a share, an extra $12 billion (quite the premium, considering the first offer was a 62% premium over Yahoo’s market value).
- Yahoo is effectively stalling while it considers an alternative of partnering with Google (ironically, a point that nullifies the original point of Microsoft’s offer not taking into consideration “risks” of regulation, considering the risks of regulation are higher with Google).
- Yahoo is hoping that Microsoft will not follow through with a hostile take over (even if Steve Ballmer said as much in his original letter). The reasoning here is that important engineers would not be willing to cooperate in a hostile take over, and regulators may be more easily convinced that this deal is anticompetitive if hostile.
