Private-equity investor Silver Lake is considering a bid for Yahoo Inc, the Web company that ousted chief executive officer Carol Bartz last week, two people involved in the deliberations said.
As part of a deal, Silver Lake would sell off Yahoo’s Asian assets and then attempt to turn around the main operations or find a buyer for that business, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.
Representatives of Silver Lake have approached other companies to gauge interest in purchasing Yahoo’s main business, one person said.
Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock fired Bartz last week after her efforts to fend off Google Inc and Facebook Inc fell short.
ASIAN HOLDINGS
Asian assets that include a 43 percent stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), combined with a slumping share price, make the company a possible takeover candidate, Deutsche Bank Securities analysts said.
Yahoo’s board met on Thursday to hear a presentation from investment bank Allen & Co on the company’s options and deliberate the search for a successor to Bartz, another person familiar with the matter said earlier this week.
A range of companies have been preparing possible bids for Yahoo and have gotten in touch with the company’s board in recent days, the technology blog AllThingsDigital reported this week. Silver Lake is among potential buyers, it reported.
PROSPECTIVE BUYERS
A private-equity company would likely seek a buyer for Yahoo’s stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan Corp, which according to Gabelli & Co, account for about 80 percent of the company’s market value.
Other Yahoo assets include e-mail, instant messaging and news and information portals that generate revenue from advertising and, according to ComScore Inc, were viewed by 674 million people in July. Yahoo also owns the No. 2 US Web-search engine, after Google’s.
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