What Yahoo! Must Do Next

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- On Monday in Real Money, I suggested that readers go long Yahoo!(YHOO) stock or short-term calls betting on a deal with Alibaba being announced by today. Instead, the deal got announced yesterday.

Read the full piece in TheStreet

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What It Will Take For Yahoo! To Blast Above $16

Here is why Yahoo! is poised to jump in price in the next 8 months.

Read the full post on Forbes

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How Big Will Alibaba Group Become?

Meet Alibaba Group.  It's soon to become bigger than either Tencent or Baidu.  The biggest Chinese Internet company in the world.

Read the full post in Forbes

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Why a Partial Yahoo-Alibaba Sale Must - And I Underscore Must - Not Get Done Too Quickly

Scott Thompson might want to do a quick deal with Alibaba to deflect attention from his alleged mendacity, but Yahoo shareholders don't want a quick bad deal

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New Rumor: Facebook Seeking Local Partner To Enter Mainland China

Mainland China is usually never short on rumors in tech.  However, Marbridge Daily is usually very reliable.  It reported that Bank of America (BAC) would be unloading its stake in CCB several months before it happened last year.

Now, this morning, it’s reporting (via DoNews) that Facebook is preparing to enter the Mainland Chinese market through a joint venture with a local partner.

Read the full post in Forbes

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Two Things That Must Happen Before Yahoo! Can Be Acquired

Today's 2000 job cuts at Yahoo! are a necessary first step.  If any buyer is going to buy the company longer-term, they need to cut more and also present more clarity around their Alibaba stake.

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Was Jerry Pushed at Yahoo!?

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- We'll perhaps never know the answer to this question but was Jerry Yang pushed out of Yahoo!(YHOO_) or did he leave on his own accord?

It's just speculation on my part, but I suspect that Jerry looked ahead at the possible scenarios facing him and the board in the coming months and decided it was better for him to leave now with his head held high.

What Jerry was facing about a month from now was the possibility of a major proxy battle from Dan Loeb. Loeb is Yahoo!'s second largest stock holder and has previously called on Yang to step down, along with Chairman Roy Bostock.

Next month, Loeb -- as well as any other Yahoo! shareholder -- could have given the company notice that they were running an alternate slate of directors to replace Yahoo!'s current board.

Read the full post on TheStreet

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Reading Marc Andreessen's Tea Leaves About Yahoo!

Marc Andreessen's blog post today, likely means that Blackstone and Bain Capital are in the lead for Yahoo!

Read the full post at Forbes

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Time for Yahoo! and Alibaba to Reboot Their Relationship

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
5/16/2011 12:15 PM EDT
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Last week's press-release war between Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Trade Now) and Alibaba Groupwas a car crash you couldn't look away from.

Now it seems as if some adults -- I mean Yahoo! shareholders -- intervened on behalf of their petulant children over the weekend.

After seeing the stock drop 10% at the end of last week, and hearing from the Yahoo! public relations team that the company had been informed on March 31 in a letter to its accounting department that it no longer owned Alipay, Yahoo!'s shareholders virtually stormed the boardroom in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Late Friday, a Chinese website reported that Alibaba Group still owned Alipay. The entity had simply been transferred to a variable interest entity (VIE) for the purposes of obtaining the necessary new online payment license from the Chinese government. But that version of events got no play in the U.S. media. It was simply assumed that Jack Ma -- Alibaba Group's CEO and founder -- had deceived the Americans and Japanese.

Based on a joint statement from Yahoo! and Alibaba Group over the weekend, it's clear that Yahoo! shareholders have read the riot act to the board. They've basically said, "Stop these inane press releases, get your act together and get your facts straight!"

Any talk of suing Alibaba Group by anyone connected to Yahoo! is going to be quickly snuffed out.

It's time to reboot this relationship.

Both sides (and, of course, Japan's Softbank Corp. with its 30% ownership stake) have a lot to gain or lose from how communications are handled going forward.

If you think that Jack Ma can simply take Alipay and Taobao away from Yahoo! and Softbank with no implication to his long-term reputation and to Sino-American business relations, think again. Ma knows this. Just because he doesn't like the 2005 deal he struck, accepting Yahoo!'s $1 billion in exchange for a 43% stake, he can't turn his back on it.

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Putting Taobao’s Size and Growth in Perspective

When you compare the size and growth of Taobao today, relative to Tencent and Baidu, the implied valuation of the private company (and Yahoo!) is staggering.

Read my full post on Forbes here.

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Yahoo! Wears a Target Once Again

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
4/25/2011 1:00 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Kara Swisher's Good Friday post in The Wall Street Journal about several potential acquirers taking another look at Yahoo! (YHOO - commentary - Trade Now) was very interesting in a number of respects, and it should reignite the shares, which have languished since last fall, which was when Yahoo! was most recently the subject of buyout chatter.

• The story suggests that there is renewed interest among potential buyers of the core Yahoo! business.
• It suggests that the board of Yahoo! has changed its tune in terms of doing a deal for the company.
• It sounds to me that there is increased seriousness on all sides about doing a deal now.

Swisher is not someone who publishes for the sake of link-baiting. She takes her craft of journalism very seriously, and that is why she's the best at her beat.

According to Swisher, the current potential suitors for Yahoo! are the same as the old ones: News Corp.(NWS - commentary - Trade Now), Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Trade Now), AOL (AOL - commentary- Trade Now), Disney (DIS - commentary - Trade Now), Providence Equity Partners and even Morgan Stanley (MS - commentary - Trade Now). And another player, former News Corp. president Peter Chernin, is also reported to be interested in doing a deal. What a deal might look like and what roles these various partners might play are topics that are still being bandied about privately.

The biggest open question from all the new information discussed in the post is, what will happen to Yahoo!'s stake in Alibaba Group? For example, if Providence and News Corp. and Microsoft all joined forces and bought Yahoo!'s core business, doesn't Alibaba (and Softbank for that matter) have a veto on this deal? This question came up at the time of the Microsoft bid, but to my knowledge it has never been answered.

Presumably, Alibaba would love to buy back Yahoo!'s 40% stake in Alibaba at a cheap valuation. If Alibaba did offer to do so at a low-ball valuation -- and if Yahoo!'s board accepted -- it would be offensive to Yahoo! shareholders.

As a Yahoo! shareholder, I have a hard time seeing how I'm better off with these assets under the care of News Corp., or Microsoft or Providence Equity or Peter Chernin. Are any of them going to pay me $60 for my shares? That's going to be a tough number to sell to any board. But Yahoo!'s shares are going to be worth that by 2015 -- by my estimates -- even if Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz utterly fails to turn around the core business. That's simply from the expected growth of the private assets of Alibaba.

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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To Unlock Yahoo!’s Value, Bartz Should Take a Hike

Yahoo! shareholders are likelier to see a $30 stock price sooner if they vote "against" Carol Bartz' and Roy Bostock's re-election at this June's shareholder meeting.

Please read the full post at Forbes here.

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If China Stocks Are Being Revalued, Why Not Yahoo!?

By Eric Jackson04/20/11 - 08:00 AM EDT

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- China Internet stocks are on fire. The unstoppable SINA(SINA_) is now up 106% year-to-date. SOHU(SOHU_) is up 56%. Baidu(BIDU_) is up 53%. Even new IPO Youku (YOKU_) is up 94% year-to-date.

We are now starting to see new Chinese companies rushing to list their stocks on the U.S. exchanges.Dangdang(DANG_) has managed to hold a price at a big premium to its December IPO. Qihoo 360(QIHU_) is another high-flying IPO from last month. RenRen(RENN), the "Facebook of China," is planning to list next month.

The more these relatively smaller stocks go up, the more it seems that the bigger Chinese portal names keep going up. Look at Sina's performance in the last two weeks alone for evidence of that.

China observer and investor Bill Bishop said on Tuesday that he thinks there is a revaluation going on in the Chinese Internet sector:

Most U.S.-Listed Chinese Internet stocks are soaring, with some up 10%+ Monday, and some up 30% or more in a matter of weeks. Many of these firms, like Baidu and Sina, have great businesses and massive growth prospects, but the surge seems to be about more than just fundamentals.

Are investors in relative valuation mode, believing that because immature firms like Youku (6.7B market cap), Qihoo (3.7B) and RenRen (planned IPO valuation is $4B+) are so richly valued, then Sina, Baidu, Sohu, Shanda et al are dramatically undervalued on a relative basis?

There is logic to that argument, and it can sustain high valuations for a while, especially given the great wall of money that is both being reallocated to China by Western funds and is sitting in Chinese hands looking for speculative opportunities.

I agree with his logic. I think this revaluation is going on.

And I agree with him that this is not a bubble. It could grow into one -- but we have a long way to go. In "dot com" era terms, I would characterize the current Chinese tech sector as being in the equivalent of the fall of 1995. Netscape went public that year in August. As its price held up for the first few weeks after, it made people reconceptualize the value of tech.Yahoo!(YHOO_) went public in April 1996. And, after that, the race was on for tech billions.

But it would not be for another 3.5 years after Yahoo!'s IPO that the "dot com" bubble burst.

I think we still have another four years of growth ahead of us in the Chinese tech world. Buckle up: it's going to be a fun ride.

But, here's a question for you: If there is a revaluation going on in the Chinese Internet world, it has so far eluded the biggest Chinese Web company in the world (at least, as I see the Chinese Web world playing out over the next five years).

Tencent and Baidu may be the big dogs today with $50 billion market capitalization each. And they will likely triple in size over the next five years, as the wealth of Chinese people increases and Internet penetration doubles or triples from its current levels.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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Video: SINA May Skyrocket: China Watch

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Contributor Eric Jackson explains why he believes Sina Corp. is considerably undervalued from where it will be six to 12 months from now.

Fri 01/21/11 06:00 AM EST -- Eric Jackson & Brittany Umar

Stocks in this video: YHOO | SINA | NTES | BIDU | SOHU | CTRP |GOOG

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