Yahoo! rallies stockholders

15 February 2008

Microsoft's latest acquisition target, Yahoo! Inc today announced having sent a letter to its stockholders, outlining the reasons its board believes that Microsoft's proposal significantly undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of Yahoo! stockholders.

In the letter Yahoo! Yang says, (Yahoo!'s) assets - "our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments - are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.

He said the company has a huge market opportunity and was uniquely positioned to capitalise on it. The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010,  "and we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders."

Yang also said that Yahoo! was a faster-moving, better-organised, more nimble company than it was just a few months ago. He said it had redeployed its resources to drive Yahoo!'s key strategic priorities - taking important steps to streamline the organisation and close down or scale back businesses that don't support these critical growth initiatives.

"We are well on our way to transforming the experiences of Yahoo!'s users, advertisers, publishers and developers - an important shift that is at the heart of our plan to create stockholder value,"Yang said.

Jerry Yang's letter to shareholders: