Yahoo! Inc. SuccessStory

Yahoo! became an instant success as it received close to a million views in a short time from its official launch. Soon Jerry and David decided to incorporate it as a company. In April 1996 when Yahoo! had its Initial Public Offering it was able to raise nearly $33 million by selling 2.6 million shares at approximately $13 per share.

By 2000 Yahoo! was growing at a rapid pace. It started acquiring and adding more services to its popular web portal. It added Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Groups which all went on to become successful in a short time span. Yahoo! achieved a record share price of $118.75 on January 3, 2000 at the peak of the dot-com boom.

But soon Yahoo! had to see the other side of the coin when its share price fell to its all time low price of $8.11. But Yahoo! was able to survive the dot-com bubble burst successfully and was one of the few companies to continue as it had done previously. It took the help of search engine giant Google from 2000-2004 till it developed its own search technology. It kept acquiring small and medium companied to bolster its services in every department.

 It offered many more services to its customers like Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Widgets, Yahoo 360?, photo sharing site Flickr, etc. In 2007 it made the storage capacity on its user mail accounts unlimited. In November 2008 Microsoft offered $20 billion to buy Yahoo!’s search engine. But Yahoo! refused many attempts by Microsoft to take control of its business.

Today Yahoo! employs more than 13,000 employees and owns more than fifty web properties. It has become a well established company that can challenge Google for the number one spot in the web portal business. From starting off as a single website started by two young college students, Yahoo! has become a household name earning as much as 75% profits on their yearly revenues.