YAHOO TAKES HIT ON NASDAQ.Byline: Staff and Wire Services Anyone monitoring the stock market's fluctuations Wednesday might think Yahoo Inc. had been transported back to the dark days of the dot-com bust Refers to the years 2000 to 2002, when the bottom fell out of the dot-com industry and hundreds of dot-com companies went bankrupt. All the rest lost a huge amount, if not almost all, of their stock valuation. See dot-com bubble. , when the Internet icon's survival seemed in doubt. Although Yahoo is now healthy and highly profitable, its stock has never endured a beating as severe as the one it sustained Wednesday -- a pounding that underscored how closely Wall Street is watching the company's technology arms race with Internet search leader Google Inc. Investors are now worried Yahoo will fall further behind its younger Silicon Valley rival after management unexpectedly postponed a pivotal change to an advertising formula that could propel its profits to even greater heights. The disappointment, revealed in Yahoo's earnings report Tuesday afternoon, provoked a painful punishment -- a 21.8 percent drop in Yahoo's market value as its shares plunged $7.04 to close at $25.20 on the Nasdaq Stock Market Nasdaq stock market The first electronic stock market listing over 5000 companies. The Nasdaq stock market comprises two separate markets, namely the Nasdaq National Market, which trades large, active securities and the Nasdaq Smallcap Market that trades emerging growth companies. . It marked the biggest one-day drop in Yahoo's nine years as a public company, surpassing a 20.9 percent decrease that occurred in October 2000 after management first warned about the financial fallout fallout, minute particles of radioactive material produced by nuclear explosions (see atomic bomb; hydrogen bomb; Chernobyl) or by discharge from nuclear-power or atomic installations and scattered throughout the earth's atmosphere by winds and convection currents. from the dot-com meltdown meltdown Occurrence in which a huge amount of thermal energy and radiation is released as a result of an uncontrolled chain reaction in a nuclear power reactor. The chain reaction that occurs in the reactor's core must be carefully regulated by control rods, which absorb . Wednesday's wipeout erased e·rase tr.v. e·rased, e·ras·ing, e·ras·es 1. a. To remove (something written, for example) by rubbing, wiping, or scraping. b. about $10.4 billion in shareholder wealth. At one point Wednesday, Yahoo's shares sold for as little as $25.04 -- the cheapest since April 2004. The dramatic erosion could even make Yahoo more vulnerable to a takeover. Some analysts have speculated Microsoft Corp. might try to buy Yahoo as part of its effort to become more formidable in online advertising, and now an acquisition might not be as expensive as a few months ago. For his part, Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel Terry Semel (born on February 24, 1943 in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.) is a notable American corporate executive who was the chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Incorporated. Previously, Semel spent 24 years at Warner Brothers, where he served as chairman and co-chief executive officer. has said the company plans to remain independent. Here's Yahoo's problem as Wall Street sees it: The owner of the Internet's most trafficked Web site keeps raking raking of an elephant—see back raking. in more money as advertisers continue to shift their spending online -- but it still lags well behind Google. And now it looks like Yahoo won't be closing that gap as soon as management had promised. |
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