Yahoo! Mails Explanatory Letter to Shareholders

Remember when all I wrote about was the iPhone? Yahoo!'s managed to push the iPhone off the front page.

In a letter to shareholders, Jerry Yang outlined the reasons that the Yahoo! Board of Directors believes Microsoft's proposal significantly undervalues Yahoo! (as they previously said in their rebuff of Microsoft) and isn't in the best interests of Yahoo! shareholders.

I mean, Microsoft's bid was in the best interest of shareholders and Yahoo! turned it down, we might see lawsuits (oops, we have).

In addition to using tons of postage (and trees), Yahoo! released it in a press release). What Yahoo! believes are the key points, as outlined in the letter, are highlighted in the press release as follows:

"(Yahoo!'s) assets - our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments--are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.

"We have a huge market opportunity - and are uniquely positioned to capitalize on it. The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.

"Today, Yahoo! is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company than it was just a few months ago. We have redeployed our resources to drive Yahoo!'s key strategic priorities - taking important steps to streamline our organization and close down or scale back businesses that don't support these critical growth initiatives. We are well on our way to transforming the experiences of Yahoo!'s users, advertisers, publishers and developers - an important shift that is at the heart of our plan to create stockholder value."

What now? Well, for now they are still working on a possible News Corp. deal; Microsoft is bound to come back with another offer; and Yahoo! was supposed to have another Board meeting today.

Interestingly, we see that Yang likes to use caps and correct punctuation when speaking to shareholders, as opposed to the "troops." His emails to employees have been all lowercase, if you recall. Perhaps he wants to be more of a "buddy" with the troops, and wants to appear more professional to shareholders. Or perhaps his shift key was previously broken.

You can download the full letter here (.PDF).