Submitted by Fox First at Ten on July 12th
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) - Yahoo gets another chance to convince investors that it's finally on the right track after dumping two CEOs and overhauling its board of directors during the past year.
The beleaguered Internet company's annual shareholders meeting Thursday in Silicon Valley won't be as dramatic as it would have been if Yahoo Inc. hadn't negotiated a truce with one of its largest shareholders, New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, two months ago.
Yahoo could make a small splash, though, by using the meeting at a Santa Clara, Calif., hotel as a platform to give its interim CEO Ross Levinson the position on a permanent basis. Levinsohn, 48, is widely considered to be the front-runner for the job.
Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo, was in the process of orchestrating a shareholder mutiny before the company placated him in May by giving board seats to him and two of his allies. The concessions came after Loeb exposed inaccurate information on the official biography of then-CEO Scott Thompson, prompting the company to cast aside its leader after only four months on the job.
Thompson, a former eBay Inc. executive, had been hired to fill a void created after Yahoo's board fired Carol Bartz, who had been hired to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO in January 2009. Bartz's ouster came less than three months after Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock had defended her and assured shareholders the company "is headed in the right direction" at Yahoo's annual meeting in 2011.
Now Bostock is gone, along with most of the rest of the board at the time of that meeting. Only three of the 11 Yahoo directors up for election at this year's meeting were on the board last year.
One problem hasn't changed: Yahoo's long-slumping stock remains a source of aggravation for shareholders still upset about the company's squandered opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, in May 2008. The shares closed Wednesday at $15.80, leaving them down by about 2 percent so far this year.
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