Press Releases

“The market needs to see positive momentum that Yahoo won’t be able to produce. They won’t be able to produce numbers that change the storyline,” said James Gellert , CEO of Rapid Ratings, a research and analytics firm. “They will have to make some material changes, like the sale of one of their assets, or this is just going to be a slow flameout. For much of 2015, Mayer and her team spent their time focused on a plan to spin-off the company’s assets of Alibaba into a separate holding company as a way to deliver as much value as possible to shareholders tax-free. But despite putting all that effort into the plan, distracted from Yahoo’s core business, the company scrapped the initiative in December after pressure from shareholder activists who doubted whether the Internal Revenue Service would allow the spin-off to go through untaxed. It was a lost year for Yahoo, Gellert said. “It’s worse than just a lost year. It was a deteriorating year,” he said.