Yahoo’s Financials Reveal a Meltdown ⇥ recode.net

Recode’s Kara Swisher got her hands on the financial disclosure “book” — it’s unclear if it’s a physical book, or just a folder full of documents — that Yahoo is distributing to potential buyers, and it reveals a treacherous situation:

In one slide showing expected results from 2016, Yahoo is estimating that revenue is dropping close to 15 percent and earnings by over 20 percent. Those revenues, backing out traffic acquisition costs (TAC), are expected to decline from $4.4 billion in 2014 and $4.1 billion in 2015 — already down from previous years — to $3.5 billion in 2016; meanwhile, earnings before depreciation, taxes and amortization are moving from $1.4 billion in 2014 and just below $1 billion in 2015 to $750 million in 2016.

That’s dire, and a little sad — Yahoo has always been a part of my time on the web, as I’m sure it has yours.

Apparently, there’s hope:

While some are scared by the numbers, everyone I spoke to plans to make a bid of some sort, largely because even as financially precarious as it has become, Yahoo remains one of the biggest properties on the Web and it is hard to be able to buy that kind scale easily.

Their stock price is nowhere near as low as it was after the Dot Com bubble burst, nor is it as bad as it was between 2008 and 2013. These days, they own Flickr and Tumblr, both of which could be exciting for potential buyers. This slow motion car crash never seems to end.