Tech News:
News Corp. not in talks with Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL

May 9, 2008, 11:09

But media company would consider its 'strategic options'

News Corp. has no plans to jump in and rescue Yahoo Inc. now that Microsoft Corp. has walked away from its $47.5 billion takeover bid of the Internet company, News Corp.'s chief operating officer said during yesterday's earnings conference call.

In the days leading up to Microsoft's bid withdrawal, reports surfaced indicating that Yahoo was in talks with Time Warner Inc. to combine its Internet operations with AOL LLC in an effort to thwart Microsoft's bid. At the same time, News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch, was said to be in talks with Microsoft to jointly bid for Yahoo.

However, when asked yesterday if News Corp. was in talks with Yahoo or AOL, COO Peter Chernin said he had not had talks with the two companies for a couple of weeks.

"To say talks have cooled overstates them," he said. "We have regular conversations with everyone in the space. I'm not sure I would ever characterize them as talks. We will always look at strategic options, but we feel very comfortable with our current positioning."

Chernin added that News Corp. has not had talks with Microsoft, either. However, he said News Corp. would respond accordingly to any propositions that it thought did, or didn't, make sense for the company.