Microsoft Corp. offers 44.6B dollars for Yahoo

Microsoft Corp. will offer US$44.6 billion (EUR30 billion) in cash and stock to purchase Yahoo Inc.

Photo: Microsoft Corp. offers 44.6B dollars for Yahoo

Microsoft makes the offer to compete more affectively against the search and online advertising powerhouse Google Inc.

Steve Ballmer – CEO of Microsoft – said the company would bid US$31 (EUR20.85) per share, representing a 62 percent premium to Yahoo's closing stock price Thursday.

The company expects that the merger will save costs of at least US$1 billion (EUR670 million) and Yahoo’s employers would get significant retention packages.

Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation and global Internet services company. It provides a range of products and services including a web portal, a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. It was founded by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

According to Web traffic analysis companies (including comScore, Alexa Internet and Netcraft), Yahoo has been one of the most visited websites on the Internet, with more than 130 million unique users per month. The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007, making it one of the most visited U.S. websites.