Along with a 13% revenue decline, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)
announced Street-beating profits Tuesday. Since CEO Carol Bartz took over, the company has cut jobs and
shuttered Web sites such as GeoCities, which it acquired for $2.9 billion in 1999. Now, according to peHUB, it looks as if Yahoo! is
trying to sell HotJobs and Yahoo! Small Business and that Bartz is favoring strategic buyers over buyout shops.
Yahoo!
spent $436 million on HotJobs in 2001, and a it was rumored to be on the block earlier this year, so they may be having a hard time finding buyers. Or perhaps it's just about finding the right buyer.
PeHUB cited a source familiar with the situation, saying Sunnyvale, Calif.'s Yahoo! was approached by buyout shops but would prefer a strategic investor like Careerbuilder or Monster.com. The person told peHUB that Yahoo! is looking to avoid a future embarrassment -- "If a Warburg Pincus or a Spectrum Equity Investors buys HotJobs for $300 million and resells it for $500 million in two years, that's going to look pretty bad." The report also noted there is difficulty in selling the small business Web site because most of its value lies in the traffic Yahoo! drives to it and that when Yahoo! goes away, so will the value.
Another item on the block may be online dating service Yahoo! Personals, which could fetch several hundred million dollars. IAC/InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI), which owns Match.com, said in April it was
interested in an acquisition.
Of course Yahoo! is looking at ways to generate revenue besides sales. AllThingsDigital says it's even looking at an acquisition. Apparently, the Internet giant is in
final stage negotiations to acquire Xoopit Inc., an e-mail productivity startup, for about $20 million.
Also, Yahoo! announced an
ad deal with AT&T Interactive that may raise the hackles of an 800-newspaper consortium it currently deals with. And multiple
reports are saying an online search and ad deal with Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) could be announced this week. -
Baz HiralalGo to the peHUB story
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Juergen Lasowski
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I've been hearing a lot about Yahoo slimming down on their different entities. I wonder if they plan on adding to the site or at least beefing up advertising to offset the cuts they are making.