IN
ALIBABA
Reference: Bloomberg.com
OUT
YAHOO!
When the one-time tail starts to wag the dog and that tail belongs to a company in China, we stop, look, listen and know where there’s smoke, there’s a takeover brewing.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, is “very interested” in acquiring the beleaguered and dysfunctional web search company.
Ma was also the person who demanded that Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz got THAT phone-call saying she was on her bike.
Reportedly she had stood in the way of Ma buying back any of Alibaba’s stake in Yahoo.
Ma told a China 2.0 conference at Stanford University on the weekend that he would be “very, very interested” in buying Yahoo! outright and has discussed options with other potential buyers. He added, “”It’s more complicated than we thought. There are so many people interested in that and we are also talking to them and they are talking to us. I cross my fingers, just to say we are very, very interested.”
Asked which parts of Yahoo! he was most interested in, Ma didn’t hold back and said he wanted “the whole piece of Yahoo! China is already ours, right? It’s already in my pocket.”
Any deal between Yahoo! and Alibaba would draw a neat line under the tensions that soured the longstanding commercial partnership between the two companies.
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