Yahoo says it will buy back $2B in stock

Yahoo says it will buy back $2 billion in company stock as it prepares to spin off its stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Investors were pushing Yahoo to use some of the proceeds from the Alibaba spinoff to buy back stock, and the company had said it would keep buying back stock to return cash to shareholders. The stock repurchase program will expire March 31, 2018. Yahoo has $726 million remaining on previous stock buyback plan, which was approved in 2013 and expires at the end of 2016. In January, Yahoo said it will spin off its stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. later this year. The move will allow the new entity to pay lower taxes on Alibaba stock sales than Yahoo would have. Yahoo owns 384 million shares of Alibaba, and as of Thursday's close its stake is worth about $32 billion.