With Microsoft's surprise $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo this morning, we thought we'd look at some hard numbers to get a better sense of what the potential merger would mean for both companies...and the rest of the tech sector.
Here are some stats to ponder while we wait for Yahoo's decision:
- Yahoo's stock price three months ago, versus its stock price today: $31/$28
- Microsoft's stock price three months ago, versus its stock price today: $37/$31
- Yahoo's current market capitalization: $37.10 billion
- Microsoft's current market capitalization: $283.96 billion
- Number of Yahoo full-time employees as of the fourth quarter earnings report (before the recently announced 1,000 layoffs): 14,300
- Number of Microsoft full-time employees as of the fourth quarter: 79,000
- Combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft (according to Nielsen): 31.5 percent
- Google's search market share as of Dec. 2007: 56.3 percent
- Number of unique visitors to Microsoft Domains in Dec. 2007 (according to Compete): 120,216,186
- Number of unique visitors to Yahoo.com in Dec. 2007 (according to Compete): 133,685,137
- The ranking of a combined Microsoft/Yahoo in terms of domain level traffic (as measured by page views to Yahoo.com and all of Microsoft's domains): No. 1 at 70 billion
- The number of page views a merged Microsoft/Yahoo would get over its closest competitor, MySpace: 35 billion
- Value of each Yahoo visitor based on Microsoft's $44.6B offer: $1,200/visitor
- Dollar amount of each Facebook user based on Microsoft's $240 million stake (and $15B valuation): $306/user
