There was an interesting article [0] on Yahoo! about a month ago - which valued Yahoo! Core negatively. They have a large stake in Yahoo! Japan worth $10b at the time that article was written. Using your alibaba market cap (maybe too conservative, that article had $150b a month ago) that'd put them at about worthless.
The article calls it a conglomerate discount based on holding multiple companies with public price points, and claims alibaba/yahoo! Japan are probably deeply discounted due to tax. But it must be strange to an investor - the core ad business is profitable and it's $1b quarterly revenue (from the article) is imo probably a safer bet than at least 2 of them three $10b companies. Depending on alibabas ultimate IPO valuation Yahoo! could continue having a really bizarre valuation locking billions of dollars away for a while.. Which is at least something them 3 won't have to deal with.
The article calls it a conglomerate discount based on holding multiple companies with public price points, and claims alibaba/yahoo! Japan are probably deeply discounted due to tax. But it must be strange to an investor - the core ad business is profitable and it's $1b quarterly revenue (from the article) is imo probably a safer bet than at least 2 of them three $10b companies. Depending on alibabas ultimate IPO valuation Yahoo! could continue having a really bizarre valuation locking billions of dollars away for a while.. Which is at least something them 3 won't have to deal with.
[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-pecu...