Yang survives shareholder
meeting, job intact

Friday's anticipated annual shareholder meeting was managed with an admirably tight fist by Yahoo executives — which spent over an hour defending how they handled Microsoft's $47.5 billion takeover bid, The Globe and Mail reports.

After all the hemming and hawing, Yahoo fielded just nine questions from shareholders — two of which critiqued management of the Microsoft negotiations, two that supported it — and called it a day.

Other highlights:

• Questions were raised about Yahoo's human rights policies in China and the dearth of women on its board.
• Some shareholders withheld their vote to re-elect Yahoo's current board as a symbolic gesture of dissatisfaction, but only two directors were opposed by ballots representing at least 20 percent of Yahoo's share. (CEO Jerry Yang got an unexpected 85 percent approval.)
• Activist investor Carl Icahn, who agreed last week to stop trying to oust the board, was not present. Nonetheless, he and two of his candidates will be added to the board by August 15.
• Jonathan Miller, mentioned as a possible Yang-successor, was thought to be a candidate for another seat but is ineligible because of a non-compete agreement with AOL (Time Warner), active until March '09.
• Yang, who promised to increase net revenue by at least 25 percent in each of the next two years, said Yahoo's leadership would start a turnaround plan in "a very deliberate and forceful manner."

Yahoo's stock price is hovering at around $20, a bleak figure compared to the $33 value Microsoft gave it before withdrawing its bid, and barely higher than its value before the unsolicited offer was made.