Yahoo! Proposes 3 Executives to Board - Analyst Blog

Yahoo! Inc. YHOO recently nominated three new directors to its board including its co-founder David Filo. The three will be voted on at the annual meeting on Jun 25 and with the addition of these three members the total count of the board of directors will increase to eight.

Filo started Yahoo! with co-founder and Stanford University classmate Jerry Yang in 1994. He resigned from the position of a board member in 1996 and is one of Yahoo's largest shareholders. Filo is contesting to rejoin Yahoo! after 18 long years.

The other nominees are Charles Schwab and Lee Scott. While Schwab is the Chairman of Charles Schwab Corp. SCHW, a stock brokerage firm, Scott is the former chief executive officer CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT. Yahoo!'s CEO Marissa Mayer is also a member of Wal-Mart's board.

The Internet company's board has gone through several changes since Mayer's appointment as the CEO in 2012. Investor Dan Loeb of Third Point LLC gave up his seat last year. The current change comes as directors John Hayes, chief marketing officer of American Express Co. AXP, and Peter Liguori, Tribune Co. CEO, refused re-election.

Meanwhile, the Internet service provider's former chief operating officer COO Henrique de Castro will receive an exorbitant severance pay valued at about $58 million. De Castro was appointed as the COO to revitalize Yahoo's advertising sales, but was fired in January when he failed to do so. De Castro worked in Yahoo for 15 months.

Despite the ongoing changes, Yahoo remains focused on its growth. Re/Code, a tech news, reviews and analysis site, reported that Mayer is planning to convince Apple Inc. AAPL to make Yahoo! as the default search engine ahead of Google (GOOGL). Google search has been the default search engine in iOS and has supported Safari Web browser used on iPhones and iPads for quite a long time now.

Mayer is undertaking several steps to revive Yahoo's business, from updating many of its online products to acquisitions. But Yahoo! continues to struggle with its advertising business whereas its competitors such as Facebook Inc. FB, Google, and Twitter Inc are maintaining strong revenue growth.

Yahoo! recently reported first-quarter 2014 earnings of that were down both sequentially and year over year, but slightly ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 29 cents driven by strength in its Alibaba business.

Yahoo! currently holds a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).