Can someone explain to me how you value a company turning a $500 million annual profit at -$4billion? I could understand if the company had $6 billion in debt, but it doesn't.
It's a bit of a slight of hand that involves independently valuing each part of the company. Nonetheless, that 55% YoY loss in GAAP income doesn't look too good. There's also the fact that the company has $20bn in current and deferred liabilities and debt, with long-term liabilities up 300% since 2009.
A company can be profitable and still have a negative valuation, specifically if its liabilities outgrow its revenue. Generally, such companies become takeover targets if there's anything worth preserving. (Theoretically, the concept is that equity holders will take a discount on their shares because the company's poor prospects reduce liquidity in trade, and holding onto a share is seen as riskier than taking a lesser haircut now.)
Conglomerates are often worth less than the sum of their parts because profits from successful businesses can be easily transferred to other businesses that are poor investments.
In the case of Yahoo, the market believes that it will destroy a substantial portion of the value of their share of the Alibaba business by making bad investments into core Yahoo.
There's an interesting effect there: if Yahoo doesn't have Alibaba, its core business probably couldn't be valued at a negative level (near zero might be possible, but not negative). I guess that makes sense at some level.
There was a big thread a while back on HN that went into the details. What I got out of it was that the negative price reflects the market view that despite the cash coming into Yahoo, they are more likely to destroy value than create it.
In the long term, a company's value is usually considered to be the discounted future cash flows. Stock price is often vaguely, if at all, correlated with this number.
They owned shares in Alibaba that had a market value of $4b more than Yahoo's market cap, which in theory should have reflected the value of Alibaba plus all the other assets.
Alibaba is good at making money. Yahoo is good at burning them.
If you take $1bn from alibaba -> $1BN goes to shareholders.
If yahoo takes $1bn from alibaba -> they pay a hundred million for a golden parachute, stagnate tumblr with the other 500$, buy startups for $499 million and return some loose change and pocket lint to investors.
What am I missing about the accounting?