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Technology February 14, 2008, 10:33AM EST

Jerry Yang's Letter to Stockholders

February 14, 2008

Dear Stockholders,

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire your company. As much has been reported in the press recently, I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!'s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft's proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders.

Most importantly, I want you to know that your Board is continuously evaluating all of Yahoo!'s strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment, and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our stockholders.

We have a unique combination of strengths

-- Yahoo! is one of the most recognizable and admired brands in the world. We have over 500 million users (nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users worldwide). In the U.S., we are # 1 in many of the most used online services including personalized home pages, mail, news, music, shopping and travel. Because we have leadership positions in so many indispensable online services, users spend more time on Yahoo! sites than anywhere else online.

-- Yahoo! is an attractive partner for marketers. Yahoo! is #1 in online display advertising, which represents 90% of the advertising inventory on the web, and we are also a leader in search marketing and a pioneer in the growing fields of mobile advertising and online video advertising. Through Yahoo!, advertisers can now connect with consumers on our owned sites as well as those of our growing network of partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers, Forbes.com, Cars.com, WebMD and more.

-- Yahoo! has the financial flexibility to execute our plans, thanks to our healthy cash balance, which exceeded $2 billion as of December 31, 2007, and our substantial operating cash flow, which we expect to grow double digits in 2009.

-- Yahoo! has made important investments in our core computing infrastructure enabling us to dramatically increase the speed of our search engine updates even while handling vast and growing quantities of data.

-- In addition, we have the added value of our substantial, unconsolidated investments in Japan and China. We have substantial positions in Yahoo! Japan, the leader in its market, and Alibaba, which is strongly positioned in China, a market with enormous growth potential.

These assets--our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments--are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.

We have a huge market opportunity - and are uniquely positioned to capitalize on it

The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.

We are executing our strategy - and making headway

We have taken significant but disciplined steps to refocus our business on our objectives to become the starting point for the most consumers and the must buy for the most advertisers and enhance Yahoo!'s long-term performance.

Starting Point Objective: Our goal is to grow visits to key Yahoo! starting points and properties, where users enter the Internet, by 15% per year over the next several years. We are the most visited site in the U.S., and we continue to grow - we experienced double-digit growth in U.S. users in 2007 on our Yahoo.com home page.

In addition to traditional starting points on the PC - including our home pages, mail, My Yahoo! and search, we are particularly excited about our growth prospects in mobile, the biggest emerging starting point in the world. Globally, there are twice as many users of mobile devices as users of personal computers, and mobile advertising is projected to grow substantially in the coming years. We have an important competitive edge as the number one mobile destination in the U.S.

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