KKR, Blackstone and others want to buy Yahoo

SEVERAL PRIVATE EQUITY GROUPS are considering placing bids to buy the ailing internet portal Yahoo.

KKR and Blackstone Group are reportedly interested in acquiring the California company, which recently ousted its CEO Carol Bartz after a failure to restore the company to profitability.

Despite Yahoo's troubles there is a lot of interest in buying the company, both from investment groups and from e-commerce firm Alibaba, in which Yahoo has a 40 per cent stake.

Alibaba's chairperson Jack Ma said he is "very interested" in buying Yahoo, which isn't surprising given the large part of Alibaba that Yahoo owns. Alibaba is said to be pursuing a joint bid with Silver Lake and Digital Sky Technologies. If that doesn't work, Alibaba wants to buy back Yahoo's stake in it, with an estimated price of around $13bn.

Other interested parties include Providence Equity Partners and the former president and COO of News Corp, Peter Chernin, who now runs his own film production company, Chernin Entertainment.

Probably the biggest name to express interest in buying Yahoo, however, is Microsoft. It failed to acquire the company in 2008 for $47.5bn. Yahoo has an estimated market value of around $20bn now. Whether or not Microsoft is willing to make an offer remains to be seen, but some analysts believe it might join with other investors to make a bid.

A company memo seen by Bloomberg suggested that the Silver Lake and Providence groups were the two most likely buyers, which means that KKR and Blackstone might not be in the running, or they might pitch in with one of the above to offer a larger, more attractive bid to Yahoo shareholders. µ