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Carol Bartz Has Sold, Killed, Or Plans To Kill Over $4.8 Billion Worth Of Yahoo Acquisitions
When Carol Bartz took over Yahoo, she wanted to make the company more focused, and increase operating margins.
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In order to hit both of those targets, she's taken a machete to the company, lopping off irrelevant, or underperforming divisions.
In some cases, the cuts make sense -- Geocities, anyone? In other cases, her cuts are hurting some people's feelings (but still make some sense) -- Delicious, anyone?
Regardless, if you step back and look at it, Bartz has sold, shut down, or plans to shut down over $4.8 billion worth of mergers and acquisition work from Yahoo's lifetime.
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The bulk of that comes from the $3.6 billion it paid for Geocities, though. Cross that out, and Yahoo has killed $1.2 billion worth of M&A.
Sounds bad, but it's not like that $1.2 billion is for naught. It got some of the money back by selling these properties. Also, Yahoo probably got some value out of the acquisitions along the way.
Still, it's crazy to stop and think about how much value has been incinerated, especially since Google and a number of other companies are on a M&A jag.
Yahoo sold Zimbra to VMWare for much less than $350 million, but we don't know the price.
This one has the internet in a tizzy, but Yahoo appears to be trying to sell off Delicious. We'll be stunned if it gets much for Delicious.
Yahoo sold HotJobs earlier this year for $225 million to Monster.com.
Yahoo paid $3.65 billion for Geocities in 1999. Ten years later Carol Bartz killed Geocities.
MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier was the one that leaked Yahoo's slide detailing what it plans to "sunset" or "merge" a number of properties. It hit home for him since MyBlogLog was in the "sunset" division. Yahoo reportedly paid $10 million for the site.
Yahoo indirectly paid $140 million for AltaVista, the once popular search engine which it will "sunset." AltaVista was bought by Overture for $140 million in February 2003. Then in July, Yahoo bought Overture for $1.63 billion.
This was quicky -- Yahoo bought Maven for $160 million, then 17 months later it was shut down.
Yahoo decided to outsource its shopping channel to PriceGrabber in the middle of 2010.
Yahoo wanted to sell its small business unit for $350-$500 million but could not find any takers.
This is not like shutting down a division, but it is relevant to the theme of Yahoo becoming more focused. It outsourced search to Microsoft to save money.
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