What significant negative factors affect Yahoo's valuation?
There are two very large negative factors that affect Yahoo's valuation.   The first is that their search business is in decline and continues to lose ground to Google and even Bing.  There's no sign that they have any plan or product in the works to offset this decline, so there's tremendous uncertainty about the company's forward-looking revenues. The second is that the company can't seem to decide what to do with its stake in Alibaba, clearly the company's most valuable asset.  It they sell it, the question then becomes what they plan to do with the proceeds.  Will they do share buybacks or offer a special dividend to reward investors?  Will they use some or all of the money to make strategic acquisitions that are revenue-enhancing?  Will they use it to develop new products/services?   Keep in mind one other thing here, too.  There's a world of difference between what something is valued at and what someone's willing to actually pay for it.  A patent portfolio is great and perhaps holds good value, assuming the buyer can find a way to monetize it.  How exactly was the valuation of the patents arrived at, and are they worthwhile enough for someone to pay anywhere close to that valuation?   There's more to this than meets the eye by using a first-blush look at asset valuation, and that's where the professionals come in.  My bet is that they have it right and there's something the rest of the market doesn't see or understand about it, hence questions like yours. I hope this helps. Good luck!
You are right: if the combined value of all outstanding GOOG shares was $495B, and the combined value of all GOOGL shares was $495B, then yes, Alphabet would have a market cap of at least $990B (where I say at least only because I myself don't know that there aren't other issues that should be in the count as well). The respective values of the total outstanding GOOG and GOOGL shares are significantly less than that at present though. Using numbers I just grabbed for those tickers from Google Finance (of course), they currently stand thus: To be fair, the analyst is talking about the book value of the firm. Basically, the value of all the stuff it owns now. There are plenty of companies with negative book value that can justify a positive share price. Ford, for instance, had negative book value but positive future earnings. It seems like there is a really good reason for that code  &gt;In July, Chief Executive John Mackey apologized to shareholders for posting messages on a Yahoo Inc chat forum under an alias for years. The postings talked up Whole Foods while criticizing rival Wild Oats Markets Inc, which it later bought.  http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSN0742771620071107 It's funny that you are being downvoted because it's a great question. If someone other than Mayer had been running Yahoo for the last 5 years under the exact same circumstances, would they have made the same decisions? Obviously no one can ever know but it makes you think. I'm not looking to contradict a fact. I'm contradicting the view that the fact is bad. It's not. Investors need an incentive to keep investing, in the short and long term.  If, for example, pharma companies were to invest only in R&amp;D, which is a high risk, high reward, long term prospect, it'd be exposed to only one kind of risk which is open to a single risk-factor materialising, at which point the entire equity will be wiped off in one single sweep.  At the end of the day, all businesses have to create share holder value, in the short and long term. The only contemporary exceptions are StartUps like Amazon and Uber. And we know from Dotcom Bust, Yahoo, etc that this is hardly a tenable strategy. "Why there is this huge difference? I am not able to reconcile Yahoo's answer of 5.75%, even using their definition for ROA of: Return on Assets Formula: Earnings from Continuing Operations / Average Total Equity This ratio shows percentage of Returns to Total Assets of the company.   This is a useful measure in analyzing how well a company uses its   assets to produce earnings. I suspect the ""Average Total Equity"" in their formula is a typo, but using either measure I cannot come up with 5.75% for any 12-month period. I can, however, match MarketWatch's answer by looking at the 2016 fiscal year totals and using a ""traditional"" formula of Net Income / Average Total Assets: I'm NOT saying that MatketWatch is right and Yahoo is wrong - MW is using fiscal year totals while Yahoo is using trailing 12-month numbers, and Yahoo uses ""Earnings from Continuing Operations"", but even using that number (which Yahoo calculates) I am not able to reconcile the 5.75% they give." "P/E is Price divided by Earnings Per Share (EPS). P/E TTM is Price divided by the actual EPS earned over the previous 12 months - hence ""Trailing Twelve Month"". In Forward P/E is the ""E"" is the average of analyst expectations for the next year in EPS. Now, as to what's being displayed. Yahoo shows EPS to be 1.34. 493.90/1.34 = P/E of 368.58 Google shows EPS to be 0.85. 493.40/0.85 = P/E of 580.47 (Prices as displayed, respectively) So, by the info that they are themselves displaying, it's Google, not Yahoo, that's displaying the wrong P/E. Note that the P/E it is showing is 5.80 -- a decimal misplacement from 580 Note that CNBC shows the Earnings as 0.85 as well, and correctly show the P/E as 580 http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/BP.L A quick use of a currency calculator reveals a possible reason why EPS is listed differently at yahoo. 0.85 pounds is 1.3318 dollars, currently. So, I think the Yahoo EPS listing is in dollars. A look at the last 4 quarters on CNBC makes that seem reasonable: http://data.cnbc.com/quotes/BP.L/tab/5 those add up to $1.40." But which effect is larger, short-term stupidity or long-term rationality? Investors may repeatedly make this mistake and forever affect FACE's price because of FB's actions. Maybe the fools who confused FB and FACE last month have learned their lessons, but the market provides an inexhaustible supply of fools. Deciding the business valuation Minneapolis isn’t an easy task and this requires a perfect graph. While you have decided on the values you need to avoid the following four don’ts that will save you from suffering any loss in the selling process. Click below: You may refer to project http://jstock.sourceforge.net. It is open source and released under GPL. It is fetching data from Yahoo! Finance, include delayed current price and historical price. "Do you realize that the board understood Yahoo was a sinking ship?  Her primary objective was enabling enough scaffolding to get Yahoo acquired and not reach complete bankruptcy. In terms of the shareholders, she stood by them and did a fantastic job with what little she had.   As for Yahoo's ""survival""? She dug that shit its grave but it was already a fossilized species. No ex-Google Exec would've changed that." This is potentially a real risk to Google. The odds of such a huge success it decreases Google's profits are tiny (I think). But there is a real risk that the increase in Google's profits going forward are materially affected by a well done competitor to Adsense.  If Amazon took away 10% of what Google's Adsense business 4 years from now would have been that is likely material to Google's earning. Not huge but real.  Even losing the ads on Amazon's web site is likely noticeable (though not a huge deal I would guess to Google - though to most companies it would be a huge lose).  There is even the potential Google has to reduce their profitability on AdSense to compete - giving web sites a better cut of revenue.  That said I think Amazon has plenty of challenges to making it an effective competitor to Google. But they have a chance. And there is even a small chance (very small I think) that Amazon could create a competitor that actually results in noticeably (say over 15%) declining revenue to Google via Adsense. Likely even in this case Google continues to grow profit as a company overall.  Google revenue from ads from their own websites are the most important earnings and likely to continue to be so. Also new business (non web-ad-income) is growing and I think will continue to do so (this is likely an area some might find more questionable). Good questions. I can only add that it may be valuable if the company is bought, they may buy the options. Happened to me in previous company. The biggest value driver we identified were staff costs. If Amazon implements their Amazon Go technology in Whole Foods' stores(which I assume is their current plan) they would be able to cut a large chunk of staff costs reducing COGS significantly. With Jana Partners buying up shares and an already large institutional share of ownership we saw the likelyhood of success of a deal to be quite high.   The new technology is exciting and we believe interest for shopping at Amazon will be high the first years which brings revenue synergies to the table.   I'm on mobile right now(at work) so maybe I can give a more detailed answer later. That's right.  I wouldn't say that she directly caused Yahoo's downfall since that was put into motion long before she started.  However, she did nothing that succeeded in changing Yahoo's trajectory after she took over.  Yahoo could have done essentially nothing and it would have ended roughly the same.  People are just upset that she got compensated quite well without achieving anything of significance.