The business of Yahoo

Two days ago I wrote about how Yahoo was handling its email business. Now, Matt Levine writes this at Bloomberg:

How Can Yahoo Be Worth Less Than Zero?
Yahoo Inc. is a public company consisting of a portfolio of

1. whatever you think Yahoo is,
2. a 35 percent stake in a separate but similar publicly traded company called Yahoo Japan, and
3. a 24 percent stake in a separate, different, soon-to-be-publicly traded company called Alibaba.

My Bloomberg View colleague Matt Klein ran the numbers in March, and non-Bloomberg-affiliated Matt Yglesias ran them again today, and the numbers tell you that 2+3 > 1+2+3, as it were: Yahoo's Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes add up to be worth more than Yahoo is worth. Meaning that Yahoo's actual business -- Yglesias calls it "Tumblr and Flickr and the iOS weather app that I love and all the news sites and the mail and the fantasy sports stuff" -- is worth a negative amount of money, something like negative $13 billion today.

And also this with a link:

Of course, profits that theoretically belong to shareholders aren't necessarily paid out to shareholders: Yahoo pays no dividend and has a ... checkered management history, so you could easily take the cynical view that Yahoo will plow those profits back into a declining business, be completely mismanaged, run the business into the ground and leave shareholders with nothing.

That link goes to this November 2013 piece by William D. Cohan at Bloomberg:

While Loeb and Mayer have done well, Yahoo's users, especially the estimated 275 million Yahoo Mail users, have suffered mightily. Last month, Mayer announced a revamp of the Yahoo Mail user interface. Many people think, not coincidentally, that it looks like a clone of Google Inc.'s Gmail.

According to the New York Times, there have been tens of thousands of user complaints: everything from "The new Yahoo is so bad it's tragic" to "IF IT AIN'T BROKEN DON'T FIX IT" and "It just feels like Yahoo doesn't care about users like me: Longtime, loyal, paying customers who were happily using the Yahoo service."

A Yahoo forum contained additional complaints, such as "new page layout sucks! Have to scroll through two screens to find send button. Hate it" to "left navigation column does not show photo folder any longer. Bam...gone. just like that. Who knows where all my photos went? Please don't tell me they are all stuck within all of the thousands of email message now."

Much more at the site. Perfect example of out of touch management only concerned with maximizing the amount of money they can take from the company. Not concerned at all with the companies long-term health. Asshats!