SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo Inc.‘s sluggish growth has been weighing on the Internet company’s stock price, but not as much as the uncertainty surrounding a key investment in China’s Alibaba Group. The value of Yahoo‘s 43 percent stake in one of China’s most promising Internet companies has been clouded by Alibaba’s recent spinoff of its payment service, Alipay.
Since Yahoo ( YHOO - news - people ) stunned investors with a May 10 disclosure about the Alipay spinoff, the company’s shares have dropped 20 percent. That made Alipay a hot topic Tuesday during Yahoo’s discussion of its second-quarter earnings.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz assured analysts the company is making “substantial progress” in its effort to be compensated for the loss of Alipay, but she didn’t provide a timetable for when the issue would be resolved. When pressed by an analyst toward the end of the call, Bartz didn’t rule out the possibility of the complex negotiations spilling over into next year as Yahoo, Alibaba and another investor, Japan’s Softbank Corp., pore over hundreds of pages of documents.
QUESTION: Can you give us any gut feel for the timeline when this thing could get closed? Is it a couple months or is this going to fall into (the fourth quarter) and beyond?
ANSWER: Considering the complexity of what we are doing, even though we have agreed on the objectives … every word has to be documented and there has to be signatures. And so to guess, that doesn’t do me or you any good.
No comments:
Post a Comment