With Alibaba shares spun off, Yahoo shifts focus to its own stock price

Today Yahoo announced it will buy back $2 billion worth of its own stock.

The new repurchasing plan is in addition to an existing buy-back program that allows Yahoo to repurchase $726 million worth of company stock, according to MarketWatch.

Since the Alibaba initial public offering, Yahoo has had to shift focus back onto building its own stock value. The company is in the process of spinning off its $40 billion worth of Alibaba stock into a company called SpinCo that will deliver much of the value earned from that investment back to shareholders.

Yahoo’s stock closed at $44.47 per share today with trading up two percent after hours. That stock price is less than half of Yahoo’s all time high of $108, which it hit in 1999. Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has been charged with bringing the company back to its former glory: Since she came on the stock has grown significantly from the roughly $16 a share it was trading at in 2012. However, a lot of that success has been attributed to a strategic billion-dollar investment in Alibaba by former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

In the last year, Yahoo has spent over $4 billion in stock repurchases, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. The plan will hopefully help bring Yahoo’s stock value up.

The new repurchasing plan is set to expire in March of 2018.