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Yahoo Reportedly Selling Huge Silicon Valley Site To Chinese Firm

Yahoo ( YHOO )  has reached a deal to sell a 48.6-acre undeveloped site in Santa Clara, Calif.,  near the heart of Silicon Valley and four miles from the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters, to Chinese tech firm LeEco, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal . Yahoo has said that as part of its restructuring efforts it might sell real estate, and the Business Journal reported in December that Yahoo was shopping the site. The deal has not yet closed, says the report. The purchase indicates big growth plans for LeEco, hich makes phones, TVs, mountain bikes and soon electric cars, according to the report. The Web portal paid $106 million for the land in 2006, back when Yahoo’s revenue was still growing and the property was seen as having the potential to accommodate more than 12,000 workers, according to the report. The site is near the $1.3 billion Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers football team and site of last February’s Super Bowl. Yahoo received approval to build up to 3 million square feet of office or research and development space on the site, in 13 buildings, but never began construction. SunTrust Robinson Humphrey said in an industry report  this month that Yahoo owns more than 1 million square feet of building space and that its real estate could be worth $1 billion. Yahoo stock closed up 1 cent at 36.60 on the  stock market today . Yahoo stock has more than doubled since the company hired Marissa Mayer, who had been a top executive at Alphabet ( GOOGL ) unit Google, as CEO in July 2012. But she’s been unable to spark significant earnings and revenue growth, and Yahoo has struggled to build online-ad and mobile-ad revenue vs. rivals Google and Facebook ( FB ), among others. Yahoo last week reported Q1 earnings and revenue that topped Wall Street expectations, but its Q2 revenue outlook lagged analyst expectations. For Q2, the company forecast revenue of $1.05 billion to $1.09 billion, down 14% at the midpoint and below consensus views of $1.102 billion. Yahoo reportedly had set a deadline of April 18 for bids by potential acquirers, with Verizon Communications ( VZ ), which owns AOL, rumored to be among the most active bidders.  Mayer has said only that progress is being made. On Wednesday, in what Mayer called a “constructive resolution,” the troubled Web portal announced it reached an agreement with activist investor Starboard Value to add four new independent directors to the company’s board. In March, Starboard proposed replacing Yahoo’s entire nine-member board with its own slate, saying Yahoo’s current management team and board had “repeatedly failed shareholders” and shouldn’t be in charge of a strategic review of Yahoo’s core search and display ad business or determine the fate of Yahoo’s 15% stake in China e-commerce giant Alibaba ( BABA ) and its holdings in Yahoo Japan. Under the agreement announced Wednesday, Starboard has withdrawn its director nominees. Instead, Yahoo will add four independent directors, including Starboard CEO and Chief Investment Officer Jeffrey Smith.

How E-Tail Startup Jet.com Is Taking On Giant Amazon.com

With a potential $1 billion in 2016 revenue and $803 million in funding, e-tail startup Jet.com has some heft, but it’s still a lightweight compared with e-tail king  Amazon.com ( AMZN ). But that doesn’t faze Jet CEO Marc Lore, who has a strategy, which he laid out for IBD in a phone interview from the company’s Hoboken, N.J., headquarters. It boils down to two big ideas: that e-commerce overall will soar from a $300 billion market to $1 trillion in the next 10 years; and that Amazon can’t possibly take the whole thing. His third point underlying both big ideas is that Jet is targeting shoppers that Amazon is not — those obsessive about saving money. “W e’re going after a different type of customer with a different need,” Lore said. “ We are about saving people money and empowering them to shop in a smarter way. And o ur technology is built to help consumers and retailers pull costs  out of the overall ecosystem. So it is   a more efficient way to buy product.” Jet aims to present shoppers with an experience that more closely matches what they’d find in a store. Every product, for example, has a single view. That’s unlike e-tail giants like Amazon or eBay ( EBAY ), where shoppers are confronted with multiple, competing listings from a number of sellers. Instead Jet.com finds the best price for a given product after searching multiple sellers and displays. So, for example, in a search for Levi’s jeans, a shopper would see a single listing for each style of jeans. The single product view may also help Jet.com avoid the SEO challenges that have plagued eBay , which has a longtime beef with search leader Google. Jet.com Secret Sauce Is ‘Dynamic Pricing’ But the real secret sauce for shoppers is the company’s dynamic pricing. Essentially, customers are rewarded for buying multiple items, which decreases shipping costs and thus decreases customers’ costs. Then, when the customer goes to check out, Jet’s algorithm behind the scenes figures out which sellers are the most efficient in terms of shipping and price, so if one seller is closer but charges more for shipping, you’ll buy from a more distant seller that charges less for shipping and thus results in a lower overall cost for the customer. “Ou r technology is built  more like a real- time trading system than it is an e-commerce site,” Lore said. “A s people shop,  we’re repricing products to reflect the true underlying economics of getting those products to the customer,  based on what products are already in the (checkout)  basket and based on how far away those products are from where the customer lives.” Jet continues to tweak its website. When Lore launched the venture in January 2015, the company used a membership program similar to  Costco ‘s ( COST ) to generate profit. That didn’t last long, and the company changed its business model in October, hiking prices. Though there were reports the change signaled trouble , several analysts interviewed for this report said startups often make strategic changes early on. Amazon’s E-Commerce Empire As shown by its fundraising and number of investors, Jet.com has its believers. Its venture money comes from China e-commerce giant Alibaba ( BABA ), prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms such as General Catalyst Partners, and the venture units of financial powerhouses Goldman Sachs ( GS ) and  Fidelity National Financial ( FNF ), among others. The company is valued near $1 billion, huge for any startup but a blip compared with Amazon’s $286 billion market cap. Amazon has annual revenue topping $100 billion — not including the more than $131 billion in third-party sales — and is catching up to longtime No. 1 retailer  Wal-Mart ( WMT ). Amazon also has a nascent payments business that competes with PayPal ( PYPL ). To facilitate its e-commerce sales, the company has elected to get into the ocean shipping business, which has the potential to generate hundreds of millions in free cash flow . And that’s just the e-tail business. In E-Tail, Go Big Or Go Home Conventional wisdom holds that one strategy to beat Amazon is to pick and choose categories of goods that Amazon is not strong in. One, for example, is fashion — though Amazon recently launched its own line of apparel and a live-streaming TV show . Alibaba-funded e-tail startup ShopRunner is taking aim at Amazon that way. Lore chose another route. In Lore’s view of the e-commerce universe, mass market firms — those competing across a range of product categories — are the only viable firms. That’s because, Lore says, whether a website is selling one category of products or 10, you need to push them “through the same set of pipes.” And thus, he says, it makes more sense to leverage the same set of fixed costs to increase sales. “If you have 10 times as many categories and 10 times the gross marketplace value going through the same set of pipes, you’re going to get a lot more leverage in your fixed expenses, and your expenses as a percentage of revenue is going to be a lot lower,” Lore said. “It makes it really difficult for the specialty guys to compete on price with mass merchants for that reason.” Lore himself has a fair bit of experience with Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. As founder and former CEO of Quidsi, known for its Diapers.com, Lore spent years facing off against Amazon. Ultimately, Bezos killed Diapers.com with a price war — the e-tail giant can afford to lose money for longer than its often smaller competitors — and bought the company from Lore. The CEO stuck around for about three years but ultimately left in 2013 . A little more than a year in, Jet.com remains one of the few e-tail companies in the U.S. that’s openly challenging Amazon’s dominance. With $1 billion in gross merchandise value — a figure often very close to revenue for e-tail firms — and 3.5 million registered shoppers, Lore already has taken Jet on a long flight, with a long runway ahead.

PayPal Q1 EPS, Revenue Beat Wall Street Expectations, Stock Up Late

Going solo suits PayPal ( PYPL ). The payments giant Wednesday beat analyst Q1 revenue and earnings estimates, sending shares rising after hours, as Q2 sales guidance edged views and EPS guidance met expectations. Delivered after the market close, PayPal said it logged $2.54 billion in Q1 sales, up 19% from the year-earlier quarter, while earnings per share minus items rose 28% to 37 cents. It’s the third straight quarter PayPal has beat earnings estimates. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected $2.5 billion and 35 cents. “Our first-quarter results continue to demonstrate the power of our global payments platform to attract and engage consumers, increasing our global scale and in turn attracting new merchants and partners to PayPal,” CEO Dan Schulman said in the earnings release. For Q2, the payments company expects revenue to rise 16% to 18%, to $2.57 billion-$2.62 billion. The company estimates EPS ex items at 34 cents to 36 cents, up from 33 cents in Q2 2015. Wall Street had modeled $2.57 billion and 35 cents. The company reiterated its full-year guidance of sales growth of 16% to 19% and non-GAAP earnings of between $1.45 and $1.50. In 2015, sales rose 15% and EPS ex items came in at $1.30. PayPal said it increased its total active accounts 2% to 184 million from the 179 million it reported in its Q4 results . In Q4, the company added 6.6 million accounts, up 3% over Q3. PayPal says now has 14 million merchants using the platform, up from 13 million in Q4, with new merchants that include Panera Bread ( PNRA ) and Crate and Barrel. And PayPal said it added new countries and merchants in its partnership with China e-commerce giant  Alibaba ‘s ( BABA ) Alibaba Wholesaler unit. In its earnings release, the company said it continues ahead on its plans to monetize Venmo, the company’s peer-to-peer payments app popular with millennials. There is no charge for users, but the company has started to make its “pay with Venmo” option available to select merchants, charging fees to merchants for those transactions. It plans to expand the service to more merchants but hasn’t given a timeline. The San Jose, Calif.-based company, which last July spun off from former parent eBay ( EBAY ), saw its stock rise 2% in after-hours trading Wednesday, after the company released its earnings. PayPal stock rose a fraction in Wednesday’s regular session, to 40.01. The stock is just below a 40.03 buy point, but in buy range from a lower 38.62 entry. PayPal is an IBD Leaderboard stock, with a strong Composite Rating of 92, where 99 is the highest. Yet, PayPal competes with a bevy of tech leaders that have been expanding into payments and digital wallets, including companies such as Alphabet ‘s ( GOOGL ) Google and Apple ( AAPL ). Since its spinoff from eBay, PayPal stock has dipped as low as 30 in last August to 41.75 in March, its highest point since touched 42.55 in its July 20 debut on Nasdaq. With more freedom, PayPal has taken on such initiatives as running  a multimillion-dollar commercial in this year’s  Super Bowl  telecast .