Two private firms are apparently interested in purchasing Yahoo and according to the Wall Street Journal Google may be providing assistance to both firms in the potential purchase.
Whether or not Google is truly interested in acquiring Yahoo is debatable. Google may just be pushing the purchase price up by bidding higher than competitors initially wanted to pay. Which firms Google is in talks with is unknown. No formal proposal has been made and Google might not even pursue such a bid.
The Wall Street Journal made the following comment:
Yahoo’s board of directors fired Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, and the company has since been shopping itself to potential buyers such as private-equity firms. Such firms could take Yahoo off the public markets and try to turn around its business. Yahoo hasn’t been able to increase revenue even as the Internet ad market grows by more than 20% annually.
Microsoft is another potential purchaser and is working with Silver Lake Partners as well as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to possibly create a proposal. Microsoft’s contribution would likely be 7 billion dollars.
It’ll be interesting to see how this goes. With government regulation, some wonder if Google would even be able to close such a deal. 9to5Google.com reports that “in 2008, Google came under similar scrutiny regarding a search advertising related deal with Yahoo that fell through and eventually seen Microsoft sign a 10-year agreement with Yahoo’s search business.” So it’s likely that if Google did pursure such a deal, they would see a similar response.
This post originally appeared on idevicenews.org, the latest news for all of your idevices.
