By Parveen Chopra, IANS
New York : Undeterred by the Yahoo! board’s rejection of its $44.6 billion offer, Microsoft Corp has said it will “pursue all necessary steps” to ensure the takeover deal is completed.
While Yahoo! rejected Monday the software giant’s unsolicited offer at $31 a share as too low, Microsoft has described its proposal as “full and fair”, suggesting that at least for now, the Redmond, Washington based company is not willing to raise its price.
Analysts are predicting that it is only a matter of time before Microsoft gets its prize catch because there is no other bidder for Yahoo!, based in Sunnyvale, California.
One Yahoo! shareholder has interpreted the statements of both US tech giants as representative of the early stages of an expected negotiation.
Microsoft may wait patiently the way News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch bid a few months ago for Dow Jones – publisher of The Wall Street Journal – at $60 a share, waited while the company looked for alternatives and found none, then bought it for the same price.
Or the company headed by Bill Gates can attempt a hostile takeover by taking its offer directly to shareholders and waging a proxy fight to oust Yahoo!’s directors. It has until March 13 to nominate a new slate of directors.
Microsoft was clearly wooing Yahoo!’s shareholders when it said in the statement: “We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company.
“The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.”
Microsoft also suggested that Yahoo! shareholders it had polled viewed the deal favourably.
“Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties,” the statement read.
Some shareholders are common to both companies and may not like Microsoft to sweeten the bid with a higher price.
Earlier Monday Yahoo! said in its statement that Microsoft’s bid “substantially undervalues Yahoo including our global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as our substantial unconsolidated investments.”
Yahoo! said its board would “continue evaluating all of its strategic options”.
The board has, in fact, explored other alternatives, including a search advertising partnership with Google, the leader in the field, but has not reportedly received any competing acquisition offers.
Microsoft offered Feb 1 to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion at $31 a share in a mix of cash and stock. After a decline in Microsoft’s shares, the value of the offer now stands at less than $29 a share.
For Yahoo! the best option is a friendly deal at a higher price, said Michael Klausner, a Stanford Law School professor who specialises in corporate law and corporate governance.
He added that Microsoft too “would much prefer a friendly deal, because it wants to retain good relationships with Yahoo! executives and retain employees”.
Even as Microsoft was readying its response to Yahoo!’s expected rebuff Monday, it announced another takeover deal. The company said it would buy Danger Inc, the Silicon Valley firm that created the Sidekick smart phone, at an undisclosed price.
That deal is much smaller and friendlier but is seen as emphasising Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive acquisition strategy directed by the company’s new chief financial officer, Christopher Liddell, a former banker from New Zealand.
“You have to be disciplined and ruthless,” Liddell was quoted as saying earlier. “We should see acquisitions as a way of growth. We should not be embarrassed at all,” he said in an oblique reference to Microsoft’s rather meek record in big buyouts.
By absorbing Yahoo!, Microsoft hopes to gain the heft it has long sought with consumers, advertisers and other online publishers, providing access to roughly 500 million world-wide monthly users of Yahoo’s Internet services.
These range from email to online dating and help generate Yahoo’s roughly 16 percent share of total US online-ad revenue.
A Yahoo! purchase by Microsoft would rank as the biggest-ever pure technology deal and create a formidable rival to Google.
Any combination, however, is likely to attract the attention of antitrust enforcers and lawmakers in the US and Europe, possibly delaying a completed deal for six months or more.