Posts Tagged ‘Carl Icahn’

Yahoo announced that it will add the former Viacom and Nextel Partners CEOs to its board of directors, the Associated Press reports. These two fellows were recommendations from billionaire investor Carl Icahn; the move was widely expected as part of the company’s deal to ward off a proxy fight with Icahn.

Neither of the two new board members have experience leading an Internet company, but both have plenty of tech industry experience otherwise. “[Frank Biondi Jr]‘s extensive experience in the entertainment and media industries, combined with [John Chapple]‘s deep management experience in telecommunications, will provide valuable perspectives to our already diverse board,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement.

There’s also a risk that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, the article said. “The fate of Yahoo is not going to change by any addition of these board members,” said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry in the article. “This is a blessing for the competition.”

Yahoo’s board has confirmed billionaire investor Carl Icahn as a director, as Robert Kotick resigned as part of a previously announced deal, Reuters is reporting. The move went exactly as planned—and sans fireworks—given that Icahn was given a board seat in order to avoid a proxy battle over Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy out the venerable Internet portal.

The report said that analysts expect Icahn and the new directors to pressure the board to consider a variety of strategic options for the company, including another shot at a potential transaction with Microsoft, as well as disposal of Yahoo’s substantial Asian assets. Icahn still owns 5% of the company’s outstanding shares.

As we reported late yesterday, Motorola has hired Sanjay Jha from Qualcomm in order to head up the company’s handset business and act as co-CEO. As Fortune writes, the move comes just months after Motorola said it would separate the handset business from the rest of the companies, in an olive branch to dissident shareholder Carl Icahn.

“Critics of the splitup plan say little will be accomplished by breaking Motorola’s money-losing handset business off from its profitable networking and enterprise mobility operations,” the report said. Fortune has previously claimed that the move will mean higher costs and less access to resources in the future.

With the new executive in place to run the division, Motorola has officially dug in its heels, even as they continue to lose market share at an alarming rate.

Today is D-Day for Yahoo’s current board—and Carl Icahn is nowhere to be found. The Associated Press reports that Yahoo shareholders are finally getting their chance today to challenge the company’s management over its handling of a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft Corp.

The article said that Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock began by greeting investors at the Internet company’s long-awaited annual meeting Friday. “The atmosphere is expected to become tense as Bostock and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang begin fielding questions from shareholders.”

Meanwhile, a separate AP report said that “nettlesome investor” Carl Icahn has “piped down and won’t even be at the Internet company’s annual meeting Friday,” despite the fact that he’s going to join the board next week. The plot thickens.

(Image credit: Reuters)

In the ongoing Microhoo saga, a lot of analysts are weighing in as to what could help fix the situation and move it forward. But The Associated Press has a specific person in mind: former AOL chief Jonathan F. Miller.

“In his four-plus years as chairman and chief executive of Time Warner’s AOL unit, Miller made key acquisitions, including Advertising.com for $435 million in 2004, along with a crucial decision to shed AOL’s roots in dial-up Internet access and give away content once reserved for paying subscribers,” the report said. “Miller, 51, could similarly offer Yahoo a strategic vision it needs to overcome its malaise.”

The name came up because billionaire investor Carl Icahn said Monday that Miller is a candidate for one of the two open board seats, the ones he gets in the deal that avoids the battle for Yahoo’s control. And AOL and Yahoo have a lot of things in common, since they’re both struggling Internet portals from an earlier era, with many of the same concerns.

Even though Yahoo has settled with billionaire investor Carl Icahn, CNNMoney.com reports, Microsoft is still looking for a deal of some kind—and Jerry Yang‘s days as Yahoo CEO may be numbered.

Currently, it’s less likely that Microsoft will strike a deal with Yahoo; in fact, the company’s shares went up slightly yesterday, which columnist Paul R. La Monica called “a possible sigh of relief from investors that the company isn’t going to be spending more than $40 billion on Yahoo.”

Still, Scott Kessler, an equity analyst with Standard & Poor’s, said it’s not over yet. “Microsoft has pursued Yahoo now for the better part of two years. Just because their ally Carl Icahn has aligned himself more squarely with Yahoo’s management does not mean that a deal won’t eventually happen,” he said. Meanwhile, all eyes are on Yahoo; another bad quarter could mean it’s over for Yang. Either way, it’s certainly not over for us spectators.

If you can’t beat ‘em, manipulate ‘em. Reuters is reporting that Yahoo will appoint billionaire investor Carl Icahn and two of his nominees to its board, which will settle a proxy battle and make any deal with Microsoft less likely in the immediate future.

The current board was concerned that aside from a sale to Microsoft, Icahn didn’t appear to have any further concrete plans to turn Yahoo around. So this compromise should mean that for now, instead of Icahn replacing the entire current board, the two sides will join together in some way. In what way exactly remains unclear, however.

“It may be possible [the move will] generate some positive change. Perhaps Icahn can drive some more staff reductions, persuade it to divest its Asia investments,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, in the article. “Overall it seems much less likely that there will be a transaction with Microsoft. The market is already reading it that way. This looks like a compromise and in general most of these compromises, certainly with ones with Icahn in the past, have reinforced the status quo.”

In today’s episode of As the World… er, the Microsoft-Yahoo saga, Yahoo has called a breakup proposal from billionaire investor Carl Icahn and former suitor Microsoft Corp “smoke and mirrors,” according to Bloomberg.

The report said that the board is still open to a full takeover of the company at $33 a share—something Microsoft has already dismissed, saying that the offer was no longer good—and that Yahoo would examine a transaction for the search business alone “as long as it provides real value to our stockholders,” which Yahoo said today in a statement to investors.

The irony in that statement is that their stock has dropped quite a bit since they first spurned the Microsoft takeover bid.

(Image credit: Clipart.com)

Could the Microsoft-Yahoo flap be irrelevant in the end? CNET News reports that Google’s steadily increasing search share neared 70 percent in June in the United States, according to new figures released Tuesday by Hitwise.

The report said that Google’s share increased from 68.29 percent in May to 69.17 percent in June, while Yahoo fell from 19.95 percent to 19.62 percent and Microsoft fell from 5.89 percent to 5.46 percent. Google has been over 60 percent since the middle of 2006. Carl Icahn can’t possibly be happy about this, either.

And now, the gloves come off.

Silicon Alley Insider‘s Henry Blodget writes that—see if you can follow this—a source close to Yahoo, a source close to Microsoft, and Carl Icahn all disagree about a central piece of the search proposal that Yahoo rejected over the weekend: whether or not Icahn would be given control of Yahoo.

As Blodget says, this part was really important because it “was an obvious deal-killer.” How did we get to this point? Blodget gives a play by play of what went down over the weekend and then summarizes it for us:

“Here’s what we think happened: We think Carl Icahn’s personal agenda screwed up what otherwise might have been a reasonable search offer from Microsoft. (This is one hazard of having a deal-broker who also has major skin in the game.) We think Microsoft has since recognized this and is running as far from Carl as it can.

“Microsoft does not care about anything but Yahoo’s search business,” Blodget continued. “All of the other terms in the convoluted proposal—dividends, tender offers, Asian assets, loans, etc.—are just a sop to Carl Icahn and other Yahoo shareholders still annoyed about the blown merger deal. These terms are obscuring a Microsoft search offer that is starting to get interesting.”