Ballmer: No more Yahoo takeover bid
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 07:50:00 11/20/2008
Filed Under: Internet, Mergers - Acquisitions - Takeovers
NEW YORK -- Microsoft Corp. chief executive Steve Ballmer on Wednesday ruled out making another takeover bid for Yahoo but said the US software giant remains open to a partnership on Internet search.
Ballmer, speaking at an annual shareholders meeting two days after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang announced he was stepping down at the pioneering Internet firm, said his Redmond, Washington-based company had "moved on."
"Let me be as clear as I think I've tried to be publicly," Ballmer said. "We are done with all acquisitions, discussions with Yahoo. I've said that a bunch of times. Somehow some people have gotten confused nonetheless."
Yahoo co-founder Yang earlier this year rejected a $47-billion bid by Microsoft for his company, earning the disapproval of many shareholders and contributing to his decision to step aside as chief executive.
"We did our best," Ballmer said of the takeover offer for the Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo. "We thought we had something that made sense. Didn't make sense to them. We've moved on."
But Ballmer said it would be "an interesting possibility to look at a search collaboration with Yahoo as we had proposed last summer.
"There's no active discussion on that front," he told shareholders at the meeting in Washington state. "But we'd be very open to it. But acquisition discussions are finished."
Google is the undisputed king of Internet search followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. Google accounted for 71.70 percent of all US searches in October 2008, according to Hitwise, while Yahoo accounted for 17.74 percent and Microsoft's MSN.com for 5.40 percent.
Yahoo's share price, which rose on Tuesday following Yang's departure, shed 20.87 percent on Wednesday to finish at $9.14. Microsoft also finished lower, falling 6.78 percent to close at $18.29.
Yahoo announced on Tuesday that Yang, 40, who took over as CEO in June of last year, would step down as chief executive once a replacement is found by the board of directors.
Yang, who founded the popular Web portal in 1995 at the age of 26 with a Stanford University classmate, had a troubled tenure as CEO.
Besides rejecting Microsoft's $33-a-share takeover bid, a proposed advertising partnership with Internet search king Google fell through this month amid opposition from US Justice Department antitrust regulators.
The deal had been expected to earn Yahoo hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year alone.
Yang's departure came less than a month after the company announced plans to lay off at least 10 percent of its workforce, some 1,400 employees, because of the weak economy.
Yahoo has been losing ground on the Internet to companies such as Google and social networks like MySpace and Facebook and the economic slowdown has hurt the firm particularly hard as advertisers cut back on spending.
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