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Tomato Burger
Jun 18, 2007
The secret is granola.

Pinguliten posted:

They've turned into an investment company. They bought a lot of stock in Alibaba, a Chinese online market (Aliexpress among others). To be honest though their old services are pretty big in some countries though, for example Japan.

Core Yahoo is worth approximately negative $8 billion.

If you read the article or do the math it's not actually quite so bad, but the gist is that their partial ownership of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (a separate company) makes up a vast portion of their book value, such that core Yahoo functions are worthless or of negative value.

Yahoo tried to do a slick tax-avoidance spinoff of Alibaba in 2015 but the IRS sniffed it out and wouldn't give its blessing, so Yahoo backed off. Now it would be more of a value-add to spin Yahoo off from Yahoo and have the original corporation just hold Alibaba and maybe Yahoo Japan too.

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Tomato Burger
Jun 18, 2007
The secret is granola.

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

that is because the ceo is a hardcore libertarian and is all "this is a good way to run a company" despite all evidence to the contrary

That's a pretty solid summary. One of the weird things is that based on the accounting treatment, K-Mart technically bought Sears, despite K-Mart being the bigger turd (smaller turd?) at the time. K-Mart was the one closer to death.

Apparently there's a lot of value locked in the properties that Sears & K-Mart own outright (as opposed to other companies, who rent space), and the next big play is to re-lease those spaces. The actual businesses are worthless.

Fun Fact: I used to work at K-Mart in high school. At least once a month some shopper would ask if the store was closing. As far as I know the store is still open somehow, 10+ years later, despite only making meaningful sales around Christmas time and on Sundays after church.

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