Will Yahoo Make Any New Deals? Watch For Who Fills the Corp M&A Role
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Will Carol Bartz's Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) make any big deal with MSFT, *AOL* or even *News Corp*. The new CEO has indicated she is not as interested in a transformational search deal for the embattled Internet giant. And now, the main M&A team exec who was leading the talks with *Microsoft* and others earlier last year, Gerald Horkan, Yahoo's SVP of corporate strategy, left the company recently and has not been replaced, according to WSJ. M&A has been slow at Yahoo recently; it has typically chosen to do a series of smaller acquisitions, say Flickr or MyBlogLog. This comes as Yahoo's major reorg of execs and products continue, and Bartz continues to study the business to streamline it.
Whenever she picks someone for the role, the choice will help define Yahoo's M&A strategy going ahead. An outsider may means Bartz will think differently or M&A, but likely choice may be to stay the course for now, company insiders have said, and stay quiet. Meanwhile, external analysts continue to elaborate on the ways and benefits of doing a search merger between Yahoo and *Microsoft*.
By Rafat Ali