Microsoft CEO rules out another Yahoo bid
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has ruled out making another bid for Internet firm Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
"We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the business to us and we moved on," the newspaper quoted Ballmer as saying on Friday in Australia.
"We are not interested in going back and re-looking at an acquisition. I don’t know why they would be either, frankly. They turned us down at $33 a share," he added at a business luncheon in Sydney.
Yahoo was trading at $12.25 shortly after the opening bell on Friday at the New York Stock Exchange, a drop of more than 12%.
Yahoo chief executive Jerry Yang said in San Francisco on Wednesday that Microsoft should buy his pioneering Internet firm despite the failed takeover talks between the companies earlier this year.
"To this day, I would say the best thing for Microsoft is to buy Yahoo," Yang said during an on-stage chat with journalist John Battelle at a Web 2.0 summit on Internet Age companies and their business strategies.
The Journal said Ballmer did suggest that a partnership was possible in the search engine market between the Redmond, Washington-based software giant and Yahoo.
"I’m sure there are still some opportunities for some kind of partnership around search, but I think acquisition is a thing of the past," Ballmer said.
"Everybody needs a good competitor, and we just want the other guys in this business to have a good competitor that they have to think about every day," he said.
Search and online advertising leader Google Inc. and Yahoo dropped plans this week for a search advertising partnership in the face of opposition from anti-trust regulators at the US Department of Justice.
The Justice Department vowed to file a lawsuit to block the alliance on the grounds it would stifle competition in Internet search advertising by controlling up to 90% of the market.
Microsoft on January 31 offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in a half-cash, half-stock deal.
Microsoft walked away from negotiations May 3 after Yahoo rejected an offer it raised from $31 to $33 per share, which amounted to $47.5 billion.
Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo to better battle Google, which claims the lion’s share of the multibillion-dollar Internet search and advertising market.
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