Ferro returned to the hotel, Yahoo chief and several key assistants have been waiting here for a long time, since the Internet technology bubble, Yahoo's performance has been declining, all kinds of problems have been highlighted, it is said that they rose in Silicon Valley, should be a technology company, but they do portals, they think they are media companies, they themselves have been swinging between technology companies and media companies.

As a technology company, they lack scientific research strength, as a media company, their channels and content are also insufficient, and they are not sure whether they are doing information or entertainment, but no matter what they do, their content is insufficient, like MM, which has the world's largest film library, which is the core of their assets, and also gives them enough confidence to extend to other industries, plus they are the world's largest film and television production group, the largest content supplier, and they are blooming everywhere in DVD production, rental, and online on-demand.

Yahoo is very envious of MM, but it doesn't have so much content to back it up, and after Time Warner Group divested Time Publishing Group, they saw hope, they had a lot of digital content on the Internet, plus Time Warner's physical content, online and offline synchronization, so they sent Ferro to try.

Mark, the ruler of Time Warner, is an extremely shrewd person, and a person with a super high IQ like Yang Zhiyuan may not have any sparks.

Ferro bragged: "Mark is a bit of a waste, I was fooled by a few words, so I wanted to dig out my heart and lungs, Bloomberg and Bertelsmann offered a high price, but he just wanted to sell it to me, I dare say that this price can make Bloomberg envious and jealous." ”

Yang Zhiyuan was skeptical, and the free lunch in the mall was often the most expensive, and he said: "This is impossible! Why did he do this? This is tantamount to giving up more than a billion dollars! Is Yali's shares so valuable? Or are there any details that we haven't paid attention to, and Yali is a potential gold mine?"

Ferro said dismissively: "Aribaba is a potential gold mine? Now he is worth more than 10 billion dollars, this is just a valuation, who knows? ”

Bazz, who connected with Yang Zhiyuan as CEO, also said: "Yes, Ma Yun is ambitious, too difficult to do, he almost relied on fraud in 2005 to obtain a billion dollars of investment and Yahoo Huaxia equity, and now he has turned his face and does not recognize people, thinking that he has done a loss-making business and has always wanted to redeem his equity, and he doesn't want to think that without our billion dollars, his Yariba would have been gone." ”

Ma Yun got a billion dollars in investment, and at the same time got Yahoo Huaxia such a "dowry", this is a sensational event in the investment world, many people are envious, but Ma Yun believes that this is one of the biggest mistakes of his career, he began in 2009, trying to redeem the equity, but his bid did not satisfy Yahoo.

Why did Ma Yun think that this was a mistake? This is because in the years after he took over Yahoo Huaxia, Yahoo Huaxia not only did not get better, but became worse, became less and less important, and became a chicken rib for Alibaba Group.

Ma Yun bought Yahoo Huaxia back then, and she must have wanted to get something from Yahoo. So, what does Yahoo have?

Yahoo has a lot of things, first, Yahoo has a very good portal experience, second, Yahoo started by searching, third, Yahoo's mailbox is still very good, and fourth, Yahoo launched an IM product that year, that is, an instant messaging product, called "Yahoo Pass", which was also a top product in the United States at that time.

At that time, Ma Yun must have thought like this: "I am doing e-commerce, and e-commerce is just a platform, so where does my traffic come from? Then portals, search, mailboxes, and IM are all good ways to import traffic, so my acquisition of Yahoo Huaxia is a particularly good business. Moreover, Yahoo Huaxia also has a lot of experience in international operations, and we can put the experience of rice and Japan into Huaxia, which can help the growth of Alibaba and the growth of Huaxia's e-commerce. ”

Why did Ma Yun's wishful thinking fail? What are the reasons for Ma Yun's failure to integrate Yahoo China? There are about three reasons.

First, business integration is out of focus. Yahoo has portals, searches, mailboxes, and IMs, and when all of these things come to Alibaba at once, "Yaribaba" will ask, "Which one do I get first?"

Yahoo Huaxia's businesses need to be integrated with Alibaba's internal integration. But in 2005, Alibaba already had its own email products, strategic search products, and its own IM system, all of which were available. So how to integrate these "biological sons" of Yaribaba with the business from Yahoo Huaxia has become a very difficult problem. For a long time, the business integration between the Yahoo team and the Alibaba team was not completed, and it can even be said that a single focal point was never found.

Second, it is difficult to integrate Yahoo Huaxia's business with Yaribaba's business. So what should we do? Can Yahoo Huaxia develop independently?

For this reason, Alibaba sent many important executives for a while, and even once sent its "chief of staff", that is, Zeng Ming, the most theoretical person in the entire Alibaba Group, to become the president of Yahoo Huaxia, but this is not good. He has led Yahoo Huaxia through several transformations, first as a news portal and later as a search.

When the community consumption industry came up, a person within Ali went out to start a business and made a word-of-mouth, and Ma Yun also acquired the word-of-mouth network in the past, and tied the word-of-mouth network and Yahoo Huaxia together, hoping to form a business module, but it was not successful later. Therefore, when Yahoo and Yaribaba's own business modules could not be integrated, and Jack Ma hoped that Yahoo could develop independently, although it went through many transformation efforts, it ultimately failed.

The run-in of the team is also a problem. Yahoo is an international team, in 2003 Yahoo acquired Zhou Hongyi's "3721", asked Zhou Hongyi to be the president of Yahoo Huaxia, but Zhou was very uncomfortable, more than a year of noisy and noisy, and then Yariba acquired Yahoo Huaxia, the contradiction was transferred to the Yali team and Zhou Hongyi's team. What was the extent of the quarrel between them? Later, Yahoo publicly condemned Zhou Hongyi, who had already left his post, on the homepage. It can be seen that the run-in between the two teams was very difficult at that time.

When Yaribaba first acquired Yahoo, he once pulled the entire Yahoo team and about a few carriages of people to Hangzhou, hoping to instill Yaribaba's corporate culture into these people. But what about the result? It was a very failure.

This glossy M&A case on the surface ended up with two bitter fruits:

The first bitter fruit is that since then, Ma Yun has lost control of Alibaba in the sense of equity, and 70% of the equity has been given to Son and Yahoo.

The second bitter fruit is that the dowry of that year, Yahoo Huaxia, finally became a big chicken rib for Alibaba Group.

Later, in 2012, Jack Ma wanted to regain Alibaba's dominance in capital — and after gaining dominance, it could go public as a whole. In order to gain this dominance, there was a very big battle between Alibaba and Yahoo. In the end, Alibaba spent $7.6 billion to recoup 21% of Yahoo's shares, it gave up 35% of its stake at the time, raised $1 billion, and now spent $7.6 billion and only got back 21% of its shares.

So much so that Ma Yun later admitted that he had made a big mistake in this matter, and if time could be repeated, he would solve it in a smarter way, which is actually, and time will not come back.

In fact, there is a very good question worth thinking about, that is, if we go back to August 2005, does Yariba and Ma Yun really have a smarter way to buy Yahoo? Ma Yun's opponent, Yahoo's Yang Zhiyuan, is also a Chinese entrepreneur with the highest IQ in the world, so Ma Yun is dealing with a smart person. When Ma Yun uses a smarter method, will the other party have a smarter countermeasure?

In addition, at that time, Yahoo was strong and Yali was weak, and without Yahoo's billion-dollar blood transfusion, it was a question whether Yahoo could grow stronger, and Ma Yun was very proud afterwards, calling himself a big fool, and more than a billion yuan came to the flicker, but after Yahoo was finished, Yali was strong, and he would have feelings in this regard.

So, business is a very fun game, and you can never go back in time. But one thing seems certain: in the world of business, a free lunch is often the most expensive.

Now as smart as Yang Zhiyuan, he also has concerns in this regard.

Fei Luo said: "I also have concerns about this, I asked to sign a supplementary agreement, after five years, either party has the right to redeem its equity at the market price at that time, this guy actually agreed, is this guy in the brain?"

"Yes!" Yang Zhiyuan and others celebrated, which means that if they do not run the Times Publishing Group well, they can still sell it back to Time Warner, which ensures their long-term interests.

This is a trick of Mark, the main intention is to dispel the concerns of Yahoo Yang Zhiyuan and Fei Luo, so that they can jump into the pit and die with confidence.

If the times are bad, you can get back what belongs to you, and Time Warner ensured its own interests in the merger with Miguo Online through this article, and did not suffer losses, but took advantage of the situation to swallow Miguo Online, which can be said to have ensured its own interests for a long time.

Yang Zhiyuan and the others saw this, their suspicions were gone, and they said in unison: "Could it be that this guy Mark is stupid B." ”

Mark sneered in his heart: "A bunch of stupid Bs!" "This Yali can also be sold, the problem is that you must have 150 billion dollars!"