Yahoo forms committee to explore options of a possible sale

Yahoo Inc, under pressure from impatient investors, took steps on Friday to handle the possible sale of parts of the struggling Internet company.

Yahoo shares jumped after the company announced its board has formed a committee of independent directors to explore strategic alternatives. This signalled Yahoo is open to selling its core business including search, mail and news sites, rather than spin it off as previously planned.

Yahoo advisers started working on the sale process on Friday, people familiar with the matter said. The step followed more than three years of effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to turn around Yahoo, focusing on mobile apps and trying to boost advertising revenue.

Despite her efforts, revenue has dipped since she took the helm in July 2012.

Yahoo shares rose 2.26 per cent to $30.09 in midday trading.

The announcement came as activist investors appeared to be preparing for a possible proxy fight for control of the board.

Starboard, which owns about 0.75 percent of Yahoo, has been pushing for changes since 2014, asking it to separate its Asian assets and sell the core business.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Starboard was taking initial steps towards a potential proxy fight.

"It seems pretty clear that the only reason this is happening even is because of the threat of the proxy fight," Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said.

Yahoo said the newly formed committee and its advisers are working on a process for reaching out to and engaging with potentially interested strategic and financial parties.

Earlier this month, Yahoo dealt with interested parties individually, without running a formal auction process, according to people familiar with the matter.

Yahoo announced this month it was considering strategic alternatives for its core Internet business, after shelving previous plans to spin off its stake in ecommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

"Separating our Alibaba stake from Yahoo's operating business is essential to maximizing value for our shareholders," Mayer said on Friday.

Starboard was not immediately available for comment.

"I think a proxy fight would be the right thing to do," said investor SpringOwl Asset Management's Managing Director Eric Jackson.
Yahoo's board is concerned about the risk of losing a possible proxy contest, he said.

The committee has engaged Goldman Sachs & Co Inc, J.P. Morgan and PJT Partners Inc as financial advisers, and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP as legal adviser.

Verizon Communications Inc is among the companies seen as a potential buyer of Yahoo's core business.

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

10 Smartphones with Features that You Won't Find in Any Other Phone

Here’s a list of phones which are first-of-their-kind. From feature phones to smartphones, flat screen to curved, fragile to shatterproof, mobile phones have evolved over the years. Although many industry analysts would like to call the current level of innovation reaching a stagnation point, there still are some manufacturers which have been able to surprise consumers by truly packing something different in their smartphones. We have compiled a list of phones which offer first-of-its-kind features, and they are not merely concepts. 1. Motorola X force - Shatterproof display Display today is the most vulnerable yet the most neglected element in modern smartphones. But Motorola finally paid heed to the fragile screen with the launch of the the Motorola X Force – the world’s first smartphone with a shatterproof display. The phone uses the Moto ShatterShield display technology, which is said to be an integrated system consisting of five layers designed from material...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog