Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Web
  4. Legacy Archives

Yahoo intends to keep Alibaba stake

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says the company intends to hold on to its 39 percent stake in China’s Alibaba, despite “constantly” being approached about full or partial buyouts of its share in the company. In an interview with Reuters, Bartz indicated Yahoo has no plans to sell. “People are wringing their hands about what to do in the China market&helllip;this is a great way to get upside in the China market.”

Bartz’s flat intention to hold tight to Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba comes after recent reports the company was planning to sell for a price tag upwards of $10 billion. Alibaba has made no secret that it would like to eliminate or reduce Yahoo’s control of the company, with serious reports of negotiations surfacing early this summer. However, Alibaba says that its offer of a partial buyout was countered with a proposal from Yahoo they found “unjustifiable,” so negotiations between the companies were terminated.

Recommended Videos

The Alibaba Group is China’s largest e-commerce operation; in addition to owning the Alibaba service, it also runs the e-commerce site Taobao and the online payments service Alipay.

Yahoo also owns a 35 percent state on Yahoo Japan. With Yahoo struggling in the North American market, some industry watchers have values Yahoo’s Asian investments at anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of the company’s overall value.

Yahoo has been targeted by criticism for its operations in China; Alibaba has repeatedly turned over information on bloggers and human rights activists to Chinese authorities. In some cases, that information has served as evidence sending users to prison. Alibaba executives have also indicated a dissatisfaction with their relationship with Yahoo, with Alibaba’s CEO telling Bloomberg last week that Yahoo had no value to them without its own search technology—Yahoo is in the process of turning all back-end search operations over to Microsoft’s Bing, although Yahoo will continue to develop its own search front ends.

Geoff Duncan
Geoff Duncan
Former Contributor
Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…
Topics
Microsoft has begun rolling out Copilot Code for building apps with natural language
The workplace-focused vibe coding tool can pull context from emails, documents, meetings, and chats.
Microsoft Copilot code logo

Microsoft introduced Code last month as one of the three core parts of its revamped Copilot app. The app was pitched as an easy-to-use coding agent that lets users describe what they want to build in natural language, like an app, a tracker, a dashboard, an automation, or a workflow, and Copilot would build it for them.

Essentially, it's a workplace-focused vibe-coding app that turns existing work into a functional app, and Microsoft has begun rolling it out through the Frontier program.

Read more
AI agents are acting like rogues and causing a huge headache for US banks
US banks block AI agents over fears they could make unauthorised financial moves
Banking

US banks are facing a new kind of digital headache: artificial intelligence agents attempting to access customer accounts and perform actions that may go beyond what users intended. As AI tools become more capable of navigating websites and carrying out tasks independently, financial institutions are scrambling to prevent them from crossing security boundaries.

According to a report published by Axios on October 22, major US banks have detected third-party AI agents operating inside customer accounts without authorisation. Some agents reportedly appeared to attempt actions independently of user instructions. The banks involved have not publicly detailed every incident, and there is no evidence that the reported activity resulted in widespread theft of customer funds.

Read more
Canva enters the AI image generation race with Craft, and it’s thinking beyond pretty pictures
The new model plans layouts before generating images, with precise editing and support for 30 aspect ratios.
Canva Craft Featured Image

AI can generate all kinds of pretty pictures, but getting it to spell a headline correctly or keep a poster's layout intact can be another story. Canva wants to fix that with Canva Craft, its first in-house image generation model. Rather than focusing primarily on photographs, Craft is designed around the posters, presentations, social media graphics, and other visual content people actually create. The goal is simple: spend less time fixing AI's mistakes and more time making something useful.

Canva Craft plans before it generates

Read more