Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, unveiled a plan to spin off Yahoo’s 15 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant into a separate company in order to avoid a large tax bill.
SAN FRANCISCO — Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, said on Tuesday that the Internet company would spin off its 15.4 percent stake in Alibaba, China’s leading e-commerce company, into a separate company, avoiding any taxes on the transaction.
The decision, which Wall Street has been waiting for since Ms. Mayer joined the company in 2012, cheered shareholders since they will directly reap all the remaining profit from Yahoo’s prescient investment, which cost virtually nothing a decade ago but is now worth about $39.5 billion.
The Alibaba stake alone now makes up nearly 85 percent of Yahoo’s market value.
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The company also gave disappointing projections for its performance in the first quarter, Mr. Mahaney said. “There is no news here that tells you Yahoo has fundamentally turned the corner,” he said.
Ms. Mayer, who built her reputation overseeing Google’s Internet search business, said that Yahoo remains committed to search.
The company is discussing changes to its 10-year search partnership with Microsoft, which is at the midway mark. In November, Yahoo struck a deal to displace Google as the default search sevice on Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, which accounts for 3 percent to 5 percent of searches.
Ms. Mayer said Yahoo would also seek to replace Google as the default search engine on Apple’s Safari browser. “Safari users are the most engaged and lucrative in the world,” she said.
