Few analysts doubt the sale of Yahoo!. In essence, the only thing missing is the arrival of the buyer, and that scandalous Microsoft offer from 2008 is long gone. But the process might not be as simple or clean as it seems. According to new information, Yahoo! and Mozilla reached a special agreement in 2014, and one of its clauses would allow the creator of Firefox to withdraw from the agreement, "also" receiving a billion dollars in compensation if it decides that the new owner is not to its liking. With such conditions, what future does Yahoo! have?
Selling a company is supposed to benefit both parties, but the business world applied to computing and the "modern Internet" has taught us that this is not always the case. A good example remains the acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft. Besides representing a huge cost, the Redmond giant never found the key to developing a viable mobile platform, and it ended up declaring the whole process a loss. It is estimated that we will soon see an old giant change hands, and it is none other than Yahoo!. Marissa Mayer is about to complete four years as CEO of the company, and there is no doubt that her vision turned out to be a failure, but her desire to make Yahoo! compete at the same level as Google led to a decision that could affect the company's sale potential, and benefit an unexpected player: Mozilla.
The Billion-Dollar Clause
According to data published by the Recode portal, the agreement reached by Mozilla and Yahoo! in November 2014 (which led to the change of the default search engine that Firefox offers out of the box) has a special clause that allows the developer to withdraw from the agreement, seek a similar negotiation with another provider, and continue receiving an annual payment of $375 million from Yahoo! until 2019 if it decides that the future buyer is not someone with whom it wishes to maintain a business relationship. Recode notes that some of the potential buyers of Yahoo! see the clause as an "unprecedented" protection mechanism, which will surely modify the company's final value and its overall appeal.
What Is Yahoo! Worth?
What is that general value? The latest round of offers was known a few days ago, and the number ranges between $3.5 billion and $5 billion. Apparently, this "situation" with Mozilla would not be the only one under Mayer's mandate, and at least another billion dollars has been mentioned in compensation for shares and other options given to employees to keep them at the company, in addition to the plan by Japanese telecom SoftBank to stop paying about $240 million annually for almost non-existent image rights in Yahoo! Japan. In short: Yahoo! is in flames, and whoever comes with the extinguisher will find several surprises (not entirely pleasant) among the ruins.
