Yahoo! reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday and there better be news that embattled CEO, Marissa Mayer, has plans to sell the company otherwise she should just quit.
With different hedge funds not happy with her performance and scathing reports of excess despite the continual downward spiral of the core business, Marissa seems to be tone-deaf to the point that Starboard Value LP is threatening a proxy fight to replace her and other board members.
Brought on in July 2012, she was expected to be the savior for Yahoo! as an ex-Google employee, but her turnaround efforts have gone nowhere. Â Spending over three billion dollars to acquire start-ups like Tumblr, BrightRoll, Flurry, Summly and many more for talent and potential winners, none have proven to help the company bottom-line.
As shareholders who believed in her, they are now advocating for her ouster since she is unable to complete the much touted spin-off of its stake in Chinese Internet giant, Alibaba due to potential tax implications.
With no plan B should the Alibaba spin-off failed to become a reality, shareholders who have been waiting and sitting on the side-line have to contend with her new spur of the moment plan to do a reverse spin-off of Yahoo! instead. Â However that itself is not a guarantee that the IRS would give the new plan its tax-free blessing and could potentially take a year or more.
As pressure mounts, Marissa Mayer is too much of a reactionary leader and is expected to go off in a different direction now by laying off between 15-20 percent of Yahoo! employees. Â One surprise from the earnings report might have Yahoo! doing a little better than expected, but consensus is against this.
So for the good of Yahoo!, the employees, other stakeholders and especially shareholders, please take your golden parachute money and leave. Â Don’t try to stick it out and force a proxy battle that will compound your embarrassment that will ensue.
