Report: Yahoo 'sale book' reveals dire finances"

The financial meltdown at Yahoo has gotten “increasingly dire.” That’s what veteran Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher reported in Re/code after examining disclosure documents inside the sale “book” Yahoo’s bankers have shown to prospective bidders.

Swisher writes that the “collective issues depicted in the book has many nervous about bidding.”

Among the reveals: Yahoo is in a "serious free fall." The company estimates that its 2016 revenues will drop close to 15%, and earnings by more than 20%. And Yahoo expects the number of employees to fall to about 9000 by the end of 2016, down from 12,500 in 2014 and 10,500 last year.

Still, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is according to Swisher, keeping stock-based compensation steady at more than $400 million, and "loading up valued employees with outsize grants to get them to stay."

Activist investor Starboard Value has been pushing Yahoo’s board to sell off its core assets after it gave up on plans for a tax-free spinoff of its stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.

Alibaba itself has been speculated on as a possible bidder for Yahoo, along with such names as AT&T, SoftBank, Verizon and Time Inc. Moreover, Microsoft is said to be interested in helping to finance a potential sale, to protect a partnership it has with Yahoo around Internet search and to avoid ceding further ground to rival Google.

In her report, Swisher quotes one potential buyer as saying that “It’s like a dilapidated house in Silicon Valley—you walk in and are overwhelmed by the work that needs to be done and how bad it has gotten. But then it’s in a good neighborhood, the market is nuts and there’s not many like it anymore, so you have to hope you can fix it.”

Swisher adds that Mayer is particularly “animated” about Index, Yahoo’s push into the voice-driven personal assistant market. But that’s already a crowded space occupied by Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google.

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