Yahoo! gets nearly 8 billion for its 40% share in Alibaba. Open Sesame?

Yahoo! has sold it's 40% stake in Alibaba for 7.6 billion USD. You may never of heard of them, but Alibaba is huge. Yahoo! on the other hand, is a one-time world dominant search engine that lost its way, post-google.

After tax that's 4.3 billion usd net, of which 3.6 billion will be returned to Yahoo shareholders who, after all, have had to endure a lot of pain.

Not bad, given they bought their shareholding in 2005 for 1 billion usd.

It's the first big news following the appointment of Marissa Mayer as Yahoo CEO. And people are watching to see what she'll do with the money.

Alibaba is basically the Chinese version of Ebay with a valuation of circa 40 billion usd and a claimed, 79 million registered users. China is limited with physical internet access but as more bandwith becomes available, the site will show natural growth.

The deal has been on and been off over the last 2 years and now makes Alibaba a totally private company. It has been flagged that Alibaba will float on the stock market (IPO) within 3 years. It also allows Yahoo now to have an influx of cash and allows Mayer the freedom to purchase start-ups, part of her vision for the company. Pinterest and Foursquare are the hot rumours, but then, they always are.

It's a fairly amazing amount of money, although the deal is more complex that I've shown, in this day and age. Pointing again, to high values for online businesses. Simple ideas can bring high results.

Of course it wasn't a core business for Yahoo, which is basically in Search and under more threat now from Facebook who will be entering that market. Yahoo needs to reshape itself and venture more into Social Media to rebuild the once-great brand it was.

If this is a sign of clever thinking on behalf of Marissa Mayer, then that's a good signal for Yahoo. But it's what she does next that will really make Yahoo sink or swim.

Open sesame.
Too cheesy?