Giants' battle for Yahoo may spark antitrust concerns

Washington

A POTENTIAL bidding war between corporate titans is brewing over Yahoo, the troubled search engine and media company. Under a widely reported deadline next week for opening bids, companies as diverse as Google, Verizon and Time Inc - and a raft of Wall Street buyout firms - may soon find themselves in a dogfight to own one of the biggest digital media properties on the planet, despite its gloomy outlook.

Yahoo's financial situation is worse than most analysts even knew. The company is projecting steep drops in revenue and earnings for 2016 - more than 15 per cent, according to a book of internal figures obtained by Re/code. The documents come just weeks after Yahoo announced it was laying off more than 1,500 employees and a quarterly loss of US$4.4 billion. The book containing the detailed numbers is being shown to Yahoo's potential buyers, and it appears to suggest that a return to growth is not anywhere on the horizon.