Corporate Death Watch

In the spirit of "In The News Today" I made this a wide thread to avoid the need to start many smaller ones. There are so many corporations out there that are near death and worthy of discussion.

Can Yahoo! be saved?

CEO Marissa Mayer seems rather smart (and hot, btw), with good tech qualifications for the job. She was one of Google's first employees. Some of the things she is expert in take 5 minutes to even explain enough so you know what they really are. But she may have taken the job no smart person would want to take.

At about 25 years old, Yahoo! in any other industry would be a prime age. No employee even possibly around long enough to collect a pension, but enough age to get real respect on Wall Street. But tech is different, and Yahoo! is more like some 60 year old regional retail chain with worn out stores, little capital to remodel, and a third generation of family that has little interest in the business.

Winner of the first search engine war, it got clobbered in the second. Inventor of the de facto first "portal" it got eclipsed by Facebook and any other number of newer thing. Today one of their bigger cash machines is a parking lot they ended up with when they did not build a new campus and a stake in alibabba.com. The latter cannot be sold without a huge tax hit. They keep throwing money at start-ups hoping for a hit.

The hedge funds hate Ms. Mayer. She naturally wants to save the company. They of course want maximum yield. My take is that it cannot and should not be saved. Many companies cannot nor should not be saved. Often you need to be Larry the Liquidator and force the capital into better prospects.

Discuss.

I like their search and news functions.
I don't think a 'third place' company should be put to death.
They are part investment-bank/venture capitalists, so there may be assets that are best valued off the books.
They don't put roses on the third horse, but they don't shoot it either.

Quote: Fleastiff

I like their search and news functions.
I don't think a 'third place' company should be put to death.
They are part investment-bank/venture capitalists, so there may be assets that are best valued off the books.
They don't put roses on the third horse, but they don't shoot it either.

A huge problem is the alibabba investment, major tax hit and no feasible way to unlock that value. Verizon has interest in the core company. But they are not going to really ever give silicon valley type growth again.

Search and news can stay, but under new ownership maybe?

I've been a yahoo person for a long time
I still enjoy checking their home page for interesting links
I think there is value in the company simply because it catches my eyeballs so therefore it catches others
They have some good sports writers such as Dan Wetzel
I have noticed a downgrade in yahoo which I find sad.
They used to have a decent college Women's Basketball page, now its bare bones.
I do prefer google search but what a boring home page

Some of my Yahoo email accounts are over
20 years old, and they have all the mail
I ever got still in them.

Quote: Evenbob

Some of my Yahoo email accounts are over
20 years old, and they have all the mail
I ever got still in them.

Wow, I didn't realize Yahoo mail was that old. I still have an AOL email that I use regularly.

Quote: DRich

Wow, I didn't realize Yahoo mail was that old. I still have an AOL email that I use regularly.

I have 20 years this fall on an earthlink mail account. One woman I was dealing with on the phone for I forget what was amazed anyone still had one. All these years and still may main account.

I am really joined at the hip with yahoo ... I use their 'notepad' function, part of yahoo email, very heavily and it would really be a task to move the info somewhere else.

It's an outfit that can really frustrate you, though, with inattention to their basic services.

Google ate their lunch, and I never went back again.

I used them a lot in the early 2000s, but Gmail was so much more effective for webmail I stopped using my Y! accounts.

Being chopped up and sold for parts seems a reasonable process to me. I'm not sure they are worth saving, and the assets would be better used at finding newer innovations.

Sports Authority could not find a buyer and will close all its stores. 450 stores.

Quote:

When Sports Authority was bought by a hedge fund 10 years ago, it was the largest sporting goods retailer. But it has struggled with the debt load associated with that leveraged buyout a decade ago.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/18/news/companies/sports-authority-closing/