Yahoo! and Viacom? Speculation or Some Truth?
The stock market seemed to be buzzing a little today with some "speculation" surfacing about a possible merger between Yahoo! and Viacom. I picked up this little tidbit on bloggingstock.com, in an article by Douglas McIntyre, who sites David B. Wilerkson's Market Watch article about some merger scenarios playing about the maket with Viacom.
In the article Robert Routh, entertainment analyst at Jefferies & Co., speculates this possible merger because of Terry Semel, Yahoo's current CEO. Prior to coming to Yahoo's helm, Semel along with Bob Saly, "turned Warner Bros. into the industry's most profitable studio over a 20-year period that ended in 1999," Routh states.
Routh goes on to speculate, "if Terry Semel had Viacom, he could run Paramount, turn that thing around in 20 minutes, leverage the cable networks across the Yahoo portal -- and suddenly they would have a behemoth of a company that would be capitalizing on all distribution media," Routh said, and it would be "able to recognize revenue from all of them."
I'm not so sure about all of that, but it is a curious speculation considering that Yahoo!'s stock has been preforming as stellar as Google's has. However, even with that consideration, I'd really hate to see such a good company swallowed up like that. I just have that fear of what happened to AOL when Time Warner swallowed it up, happening to Yahoo! -- and that, in my own selfish (Search thinking) mind, could turn out to be a huge disservice to the industry and ultimately .... searchers.
Interesting food for thought, purely speculation at this point, and I hope it stays that way.
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