Wall Street’s Valuation of Yahoo’s Core Business

Matthew Klein, writing for Bloomberg View:

Alibaba is valued at about $153 billion, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News. Yahoo itself is worth about $39 billion as of this writing and this includes its ownership of about 24 percent of Alibaba. If you subtract that out you are left with a company that’s worth just a little more than $2 billion — less than AOL Inc., Groupon Inc., or Zynga Inc.

Yahoo also has a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, a publicly traded company now valued at about $32.3 billion. Subtract out Yahoo’s stake and this means that investors seem to value Yahoo’s own business at less than nothing — not what you would expect from a profitable enterprise.

I’d say this is more damning of Wall Street than Yahoo.

★ Monday, 17 March 2014