The guessing game about potential Yahoo bidders is in full swing, following the company’s announcement on Wednesday that it’s open to consider any “qualified strategic proposals.”
Big media and communications companies, as well as private-equity firms, are the primary suspects. Verizon, AT&T, News Corp., Disney, and Comcast have all been mentioned as potential bidders in previous reports.
And we’ll likely get more leaked details about suitors and proposals in the coming weeks.
But it looks like News Corp., which was previously cited in several media reports, can be crossed off the list. The media giant, which owns the Dow Jones news service and the New York Post, has no interest in Yahoo, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Verizon has remained silent so far, despite its CEO hinting at his interest in a possible deal. At Business Insider’s IGNITION conference in December, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said that if “it turned out that parts of it, or all of it were for sale, we’d look at it like anything in the digital media area at this point, because it’s so hot.”
According to the Financial Times, several private equity firms, including Bain and TPG, are interested in Yahoo’s core business. Jim Coulter, the co-CEO of TPG, was cagey when asked about Yahoo by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang earlier on Wednesday:
TPG Co-CEO Jim Coulter told me this today re: their reported interest in Yahoo pic.twitter.com/7Q41PToWq6
— Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) February 3, 2016
“Given our base case does not value any individual display asset over $700M, a much wider range of companies can be bidders for YHOO’s individual properties,” RBC’s note said.
But that may not be a choice because splitting up Yahoo’s core would make it too complicated and not command the same type of multiple Yahoo wants out of the deal.
“Most likely the whole core [will be sold] because it’s too hard to split out the various verticals,” SunTrust analyst Robert Peck told us last month.
As reported by Business Insider