Foreign media reported that Microsoft still tends to acquire Yahoo! alone.

April 12 (Beijing Time) -- According to foreign media report, although Microsoft does not rule out the possibility of cooperating with News Corporation to acquire Yahoo! or adopting other operation modes, it still tends to independently acquire Yahoo!.

Insiders said that Microsoft still favored its initially proposed scheme to acquire Yahoo! in a cash and stock deal worth $31 per share, but it did not rule out the possibility of teaming up with other companies to acquire Yahoo!. Previously, there were messages saying that Microsoft planned to jointly acquire Yahoo! with News Corporation, eventually integrating Yahoo!, Microsoft MSN and News Corporation's social website MySpace together.

The Yahoo! board convened a meeting on Friday to evaluate various schemes, including deepening the merger negotiation with Time Warner AOL. However, no decision was made at this meeting. Insiders revealed that what Yahoo! and Time Warner were discussing was that Time Warner would incorporate most of AOL businesses into Yahoo! and invest part of cash in exchange for 20% stake of the newly merged company. As part of this transaction, Yahoo! would repurchase its shares by using Time Warner investment and other funds, and the repurchase price would be between $30 and $40.

On Wednesday, Yahoo! also announced that it would outsource part of its search advertising business to Google for testing. Market analysts believed that this could be part of Yahoo!'s consideration to form a tripartite alliance with Google and AOL as an alternative to being acquired by Microsoft.