Shareholders Give Thumbs Up to Yahoo’s Board

Besieged Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s CEO, won an overwhelming 85 percent of the votes in his favor in the company’s annual meeting in San Jose on Friday. Chairman Roy Bostock was re-elected with about 80 percent of the votes.

In fact all the current nine directors won favor of the investors holding nearly 76 percent of Yahoo's 1.38 billion. Director Arthur Kern, with 78 percent votes in his favor, received the lowest number of supporting votes. Vyomesh Joshi of Hewlett-Packard received the highest support with 93%

Yahoo officials did not expect to get such solid support. They had braced themselves for strong protests in the wake of failure of merger talks with Internet behemoth Microsoft. Yahoo's slipping performance against Google was another cause of concern for them.

Not everybody applauded the present set of nine directors. Few dissatisfied investors criticized the board and management for the failure of talks with Microsoft and the resultant dip in stock prices. Eric Jackson, a vocal critic said, "I think you have overpaid in terms of executive compensation, overplayed your hand with Microsoft and overstayed your welcome on the board."

Responding to the question as to why the talks with Microsoft collapsed, Chairman Roy Bostock accused Microsoft of being a bad communicator. He said that Yahoo’s board "encouraged Microsoft to engage in more discussions, but they in fact reduced engagement and suggested they’d lower the price and launch a proxy fight."

Bostock averred that Microsoft did not explicitly communicate to Yahoo’s board that it wanted to raise the offer from its original $31-per-share bid to $33-per-share. In fact, Bostock said he could not understand why Microsoft withdrew its bid. "There was never a compelling offer put on the table," he said. "That never occurred in this process."

Many shareholders were conspicuous by their absence. The empty chairs outnumbered the 100 shareholders that attended the meeting. Yahoo shares slipped 9 cents on Friday to $19.80. Ironically, Microsoft's last offer valued Yahoo at $33 per share.