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Diagramming Yahoo's position 3:03

Author Dan Roam breaks down Microsoft's rejected bid for Yahoo and Carl Icahn's reasons for launching a proxy battle

Have you ever doodled on the back of the napkin? Well, it has been the start of some multi-million-dollar ideas, Dan Roam is the author of "the Back of the Napkin", he thinks everyone has a talent when it comes to visual thinking and he thinks they can solve the problems of some of the world’s largest companies. We’re gonna talk to him right now about Microsoft and Yahoo. The saga continues.

It continues.

Let’s talk about first, how visually, people can see, why a tie-up with Microsoft and Yahoo might make sense, Dan.

OK, so Poppy, Let’s go back into a little bit background, imagine if you will in the market of software, you have a big old company out here called Microsoft. Fair enough, it’s got about a 282 billion-dollar market cap. Now the interesting thing is that, as we know, Microsoft offers lots of different applications, lots of different software solutions, but they’re all expensive. Let’s face the way Microsoft makes its money is by selling you licenses to use their software. Yep.

Now down here, the other extreme we have almost as big a company, certainly getting there at 181 billion, which is the big Google down here. Now the interesting thing, they don’t have as many applications as they offer, but they’re all free. Nobody pays to use any kind of Google offering. So what’s Microsoft wanna do, are they gonna be able to suddenly drop the prices of all their software as Google starts to make more and more applications to compete? No! What Microsoft does is to see this a little company down here, called Yahoo, valued at about 35 billion. It says you know what? We can block Google by just buying that. Purely defensive move, defensive offensive move makes perfect sense, helps Microsoft buy its way into the free software space, that’s why it's interesting for them to do it. Now as we know, they made deploy, didn’t work out, they decided not to do it and now the sudden Carl Icahn's coming back and saying "let’s do it anyway".

Oh, yeah, Yahoo wants to be this Google on its own, while the shareholders think it can’t provide without tie-up, so now Carl Icahn jumps into the mix, launching a proxy battle, he wants to tie the two up. He wants to name his own board members, so why is Yahoo attractive to call Carl Icahn with the tie-up with Microsoft, why is it doing this?

Ok, let’s look at a different kind of chart now. Let's look at what it just the prices about what’s gonna happen. So when Microsoft came in and made its offer to Yahoo, it’s made its offer at 31 dollars a share at the time Yahoo was trading at I think about 24 dollars a share. Yahoo said no, so Microsoft said OK, we’ll go up to 34 dollars a share. Look at the difference already between what Yahoo’s actually trading at and what they offers.

And yahoo is actually below 20 when their first offer came in NASDAQ, yeah, 19...

Was it below 20, OK? So it’s probably down here and then it went up. And all of a sudden, what Jerry Yang says is we want 37 dollars. Look at the difference that he is asking for, Microsoft Steve Ballmer says too rich for me, I’m out of here. Forget the whole thing. But what Carl Icahn, now he’s saying, look at all the shareholders who are seeing the amount of money, that they potentially just lost between the difference at what Yahoo’s actually trading at and we were just offered. So, of course, Icahn comes in and says, look guys, let’s stop this proxy battle, let’s get rid of all the people who said no, let’s get that value of Yahoo back up to here, let’s make the sale. Make sense.

Alright, thank you, Dan, it’s not just Microsoft and Yahoo that can draw things out, a lot of other big companies have done, they can do that. Check out Dan’s website thebackofthenapkin.com

文本参考中文翻译

Dan Roam解析了微软拒绝收购雅虎的形势以及Carl Icahn发起代理权争夺战的原因。

你有没有在餐巾背面乱写乱画过呢？这就是这个价值数百万美元的想法的开始。Dan Roam就是“写在餐巾背后的主义”的作者。他认为每个人都有足够的智慧解决世界上最大的公司的一部分问题。我们现在将联系他讨论一下微软和雅虎之间的问题。两公司之间的故事还在继续。

是还在继续。

首先让我们谈一下，人们怎样能看出来，为什么微软和雅虎之间的结合是可行的呢？

好的，伙计，让我们脚踏实地一点，假设你深处软件市场，你有一个老牌的大公司微软，它大约占了软件市场2820亿美元的市场份额。现在，有趣的是，我们知道，微软供应许多不同的应用软件，许多不同的软件解决方案，但是价格都非常昂贵。微软赚钱的方式是向你出售软件使用许可证。是的。

另外一边，也有一个几乎同样大的公司，大约价值1810亿美元，那就是Google。现在有趣的是，他们并没有足够的应用软件，但是所提供的软件都是免费的。每个人使用Google提供的任何软件都是免费的。所以，微软想怎么做呢？在Google逐渐开发越来越多的应用软件的时候，微软会不会突然降低所有软件的价格来与之抗衡呢？不！微软看上了这个叫做雅虎的小公司，价值350亿美元。你知道它说什么吗？我们可以通过收购雅虎来打击Google。纯粹防御性的举动，这听上去非常完美，完全行得通，可以帮助微软进入免费软件领域，这是吸引他们收购雅虎的原因。现在，我们知道的是，微软进行了部署，但是没有成功，他们放弃收购计划。现在激进投资者Carl Icahn回归，说“无论如何我们都要收购雅虎。”

是的，可以将雅虎发展成自己的搜索部门，但是股东们认为，如果不实现完全合并，并不能达到预期的效果。在这种混乱局面下，Carl Icahn站出来，发起一场代理权争夺战，希望两者能够联合起来。他希望提出自己的董事会名单，那么为什么Carl Icahn对雅虎和微软的结合如此感兴趣呢，他为什么要这么做呢？

好的，让我们看一下另外一张图表，看一下价格因素在其中的作用。最开始微软对雅虎提出收购计划的时候，提出以每股31美元的价格收购，而当时雅虎股票的成交价格大约是每股24美元。雅虎拒绝，然后，微软说，好，那我们加到每股34美元。我们可以看到雅虎的实际成交价格和微软提供的价格之间的差别。

当微软第一次在纳斯达克提出收购计划时，雅虎的实际成交价格在每股20美元以下，是的，大约19……

是在20美元以下，对吗？那么它可能下跌到那个水平，之后又上涨了。之后杨致远突然提出每股37美元。看一下他提出的价格的差异，微软CEO Steve Ballmer说，这个价格对我们来说太高了，我不能接受，忘记整个交易吧。一批股东说，他们可能会损失雅虎的实际成交价格和微软提供的价格之间的差额。Carl Icahn说，好吧，伙计们，让我们停止代理权之争吧，让我们除掉所有否决的人，让我们来评估雅虎的价值，让我们来完成这笔交易。这笔交易完全行得通。

好的，谢谢你，Dan。不仅微软和雅虎面临这种问题，许多其他公司也做过类似的举动，他们也可以。可以登录Dan的网页thebackofthenapkin.com来了解更多信息。