Marissa Mayer tops CEOs ranked by stock performance

Yahoo stock has risen 75% since she took over the company a year ago

Tomorrow it will be one year exactly since Yahoo surprised everyone and appointed Google engineer Marissa Mayer as its new CEO, following the Scott Thompson resume scandal that had ended his time as CEO in early May, after only four months on the job.

There are obviously many ways to gauge whether or not Mayer has been a success as CEO so far. Has she implimented a good strategy for the company? Has she built up morale among employees? Is the company making more or less money than it did when she started?

I am choosing to look at it from the point of view of an investor: how has the company's stock price done since she took over last year?

If you looked at if from that metric alone, it would seem like she is doing extremely well, as it has risen nearly 75% in that time.

At the end of trading on July 16th of last year, the company's stock was $15.65 a share. At the end of trading Monday, Yahoo's stock was up 0.4%, or 11 cents, to $27.34 a share.

A big part of the reason for the stock being up was the decision, made by Yahoo’s board, to sell half of its Alibaba holdings. This was done at the same time Mayer was being installed as CEO,  and it gave Yahoo $7.6 billion to work with. And Yahoo still owns another 24% of Alibaba, which is expected to go public some time next year, at which point Yahoo will see a pretty hefty windfall.

While there was some luck involved in Mayer getting her hands on this money, but it was also her decisions as CEO, including acquiring 17 start ups, along with the $1.1 billion Tumblr deal, that made the difference in how investors viewed the company. 

How does Mayer compare to other CEOs?

This is not an extensive list, but here you go. A 75% increase in stock price is a success, no matter how you slice it. But there is another way to look at this: how have other CEOs that took over major, established companies fared after a single year?

Few, it seems, have been able to do better.

Tim Cook
Apple CEO on August 24, 2011
Stock: 77% plus 

In fact, the only one I could think of who has done better at the one year mark was Tim Cook, who took over as CEO of Apple for Steve Jobs on August 24, 2011. The stock ended the day before he took over at $373.60, and was up over 77%, to $663.22, a year later. 

 

 

Thorsten Heins
RIM (BlackBerry) CEO on January 23, 2012
Stock: 11% plus 

Thorsten Heins became the CEO of Research in Motion (now BlackBerry) after the company's co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, stepped down on January 23rd, 2012. At the time shares were $15.56; by January 23rd, 2013, shares were up over 11% to $17.35.

 

 

Larry Page
Google CEO on April 4, 2011
Stock: 8% plus  

Google CEO Larry Page, who took over for Eric Schmidt on April 4, 2011, inherited a company whose stock price was $587.68. On April 4th, 2012, the price was $635.15, a gain of only 8%.

 

 

Some have even lost ground in their first years.

Michael Dell
Dell CEO on January 31, 2011
Stock: 17% down

Michael Dell, who had been the CEO of Dell until he stepped down in 2004, took over the reigns once again on January 31st, 2007. At the time, Dell's stock price was $24.22, and year later it was worse: closing on January 31st, 2008 at $20.04, down over 17%.

 

 

Meg Whitman
Hewlett Packard CEO on September 22, 2011
Stock: 23% down

Then there is Meg Whitman, who took over as CEO of Hewlett Packard on September 22, 2011. In her first year as CEO, the company's stock went from $22.80 a share to $17.59, a loss of almost 23%.

 

 

What about former Yahoo CEOs?

But the best way of all might just be to compare how Mayer is doing to her predecessors: the former CEOs of Yahoo. 

Yahoo has has issues keeping confidence in those holding the CEO position ever since Terry Semel, who became CEO in 2001, was replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang in 2007. Since then, no other CEO has lasted more than two years.

Jerry Yang
Yahoo CEO on June 18, 2007
Stock: 23% down  

When Yang took over on June 18, 2007, the stock was $28.12, and a year later it was down nearly 23%, to 22.91 a share.

By the time he was replaced by Autodesk's CEO Carol Bartz on January 13, 2009, Yang had left the stock in shambles, down 57% to $12.10.

 

Carol Bartz
Yahoo CEO on January 13, 2009
Stock: 34% plus  

Bartz only held the top spot until September 7, 2011, when she was fired over the phone, in a move that was seen, by some, as an example of sexism in Silicon Valley. She did have a positive effect on the stock, though, seeing it rise from $12.10 to $16.90 after a year on the job, a gain of almost 34%.

 By the time she left, though, that gain was less than 13%, or $13.61 a share. 

 

Scott Thompson
Yahoo CEO on January 4, 2012
Stock: 3% down

Her successor, former PayPal President Scott Thompson, who took over on January 4th 2012, barely even had time to make a dent.

His tenure at Yahoo was marred by failure and scandal, and he only lasted four months, during which Yahoo's stock went from $15.78 to $15.19, a loss of over 3%.

To put it in perspective, here is what Yahoo's stock has looked like since Yang first took over as CEO in 2007. I have placed the hand roughly at the point where Mayer took the helm last year:

Personally, I think Marissa Mayer has been doing a pretty great job at Yahoo since she took over. She has been very busy trying to get the company on a mobile pathway that it should have been on for years, and she has, at least partially, turned Yahoo into a place where people might want to work again.

Thinks have not been perfect, of course; there was that hiccup involving the company's remote worker policy. And the view of her time as CEO might come under some more severe scrunity if tomorrow's earnings report disappoints.

But from an investor stand point, its hard to see this past year at Yahoo as anything but a big success.

(Image source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com)