SEC Filings - Day Three Homework Review by Michelle Leder

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Homework review: Google & Yahoo! Both companies made big purchases during the past quarter: Google bought Waze; Yahoo bought Tumblr. The purchase price for each was just around $1 billion (Yahoo spent $990 million on Tumblr, Google spent $966 million on Waze) In terms of accounting for those acquisitions, both companies took large chunks of those purchase prices as goodwill, an accounting placeholder. For Yahoo, it was $751 milion in goodwill; for Google it was $847 million. There were also big placeholders for intangible assets in both acquisitions: $262 million at Yahoo and $188 million at Google. Yahoo assigned an amazing $182 million valuation to Tumblr's "customer relationships.” Similar acquisitions like this have often resulted in big write-downs months or sometimes years after the fact.

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This review is part of the 2013 SEC Filings Master Class homework assignment for Day Three. Attendees were invited to participate in daily homework assignments to apply what they learned in each session. To check out other materials regarding SEC Filings for journalists, please visit http://bit.ly/secfilings2013. For more information about free training for business journalists, please visit http://businessjournalism.org.

Transcript of SEC Filings - Day Three Homework Review by Michelle Leder

Page 1: SEC Filings - Day Three Homework Review by Michelle Leder

Homework review: Google & Yahoo! •  Both companies made big purchases during the past quarter: Google bought

Waze; Yahoo bought Tumblr."•  The purchase price for each was just around $1 billion (Yahoo spent $990

million on Tumblr, Google spent $966 million on Waze)"•  In terms of accounting for those acquisitions, both companies took large chunks

of those purchase prices as goodwill, an accounting placeholder. For Yahoo, it was $751 milion in goodwill; for Google it was $847 million."

•  There were also big placeholders for intangible assets in both acquisitions: $262 million at Yahoo and $188 million at Google."

•  Yahoo assigned an amazing $182 million valuation to Tumblr's "customer relationships.”"

•  Similar acquisitions like this have often resulted in big write-downs months or sometimes years after the fact."