SAN FRANCISCO — A large Yahoo Inc. shareholder has joined a growing chorus urging the beleaguered Internet company to set aside its past differences with Microsoft Corp. and renew negotiations to sell its search operations to the spurned suitor.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Yahoo’s board, Ivory Investment Management called upon the directors to make amends for “acting unreasonably” in their earlier talks with Microsoft by quickly closing a deal with the software maker now.
Ivory Investment, which owns a 1.5 percent stake in Yahoo, reasoned the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company could persuade Microsoft to pay $15 billion for its search operations and still emerge with more earning power than it currently has.
The net result: Yahoo could nearly double its current stock price to at least $24, based on the financial assumptions made in Ivory’s analysis.
Some of Ivory’s math is debatable, but there is little doubt left on Wall Street that a search deal with Microsoft now appears to be Yahoo’s best bet, said Stanford Group analyst Clayton Moran.
“It’s a very reasonable question for Yahoo shareholders to be asking right now: why the company isn’t talking to Microsoft right now,” Moran said. “The pressure should be mounting for them to talk because there is no good explanation for them not to be doing so at this point.”
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