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.

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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.