Verizon buys Yahoo in bid to boost digital side
Seeking a wider digital audience, Verizon is buying Yahoo for US$4.83 billion in a deal that marks the end of an era for a company that defined much of the early Internet but struggled to stay relevant in an online world dominated by Google and Facebook.
It’s the second time in as many years that Verizon has snapped up the remnants of a fallen Internet star. The nation’s largest wireless carrier paid US$4.4 billion for AOL last year. The two brands will be rolled into the same operation.
“We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished: This transaction is about unleashing Yahoo’s full potential,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement.
Despite Yahoo’s travails, its operations are a prize for Verizon, which wants to capitalize on the growing number of people living their digital lives on smartphones.
The company already profits from the data plans that connect more than 100 million people and their devices to the Internet. Now it’s making plans to control more of the advertising on those devices.
Most analysts expect the deal to end the four-year reign of Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, who flopped in her much-watched attempt to turn around the company that was once a titan valued at US$130 billion.
However, Mayer told employees Monday in an email that she intends to stay “to see Yahoo into its next chapter” without specifying for how long.
In a later interview with The Associated Press, she said it’s too early to know whether there will still be a desirable role for her after Yahoo and AOL are combined.
“It would be premature and presumptive of me to discuss what Verizon may or may not want to do. I will be open-minded,” said Mayer, who could receive a severance package valued at US$55 million if she leaves following the sale.
In its announcement, Verizon did not discuss Mayer’s future or its long-term plans for Yahoo.
Shareholders fed up with a steep down turn in the company’ s revenue over the past eight years pressured Yahoo Inc. to part with its email service and still-popular websites devoted to news, finance and sports, in addition to its advertising tools.
The slump deepened even as advertisers poured torrents of cash into what is now a US$160 billion market for digital advertising, according to research firm eMarketer.
But most of that money has flowed to Google and Facebook, two companies that eclipsed Yahoo during its long slide from a sensation to a dysfunctional also-ran.
The sale could result in thousands of layoffs as Verizon eliminates overlapping jobs and services in Yahoo and AOL. Mayer has already jettisoned 1,900 Yahoo workers since last September.
The merging of Yahoo’s online operations with AOL’s sets up a potential reunion between Mayer and Armstrong, who were both executives at Google for years. Armstrong tried unsuccessfully to persuade Mayer to combine the two companies when they were both still independent.
“It makes a little less sense now than it did two or three years ago” when Yahoo and AOL were stronger,” said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank. “But better late than never.”
When the sale is complete early next year, Yahoo will become a holding company for its two stakes in China’s e-commerce leader, Alibaba Group, and Yahoo Japan.
Those investments, made more than a decade ago, are worth more than US$40 billion before taxes, making them by far the most valuable pieces of Yahoo.
The holding company will drop the Yahoo name and adopt a new identify after Verizon takes control of the operating business.
Until the sale is done, Yahoo’s users should not see any major changes in the company’s mobile apps or websites.
Mayer, 41, is the latest in a succession of Yahoo CEOs who could not engineer a comeback. Yahoo’s annual revenue, after subtracting ad commissions, has declined by about 20 per cent from US4.4 billion before Mayer’s arrival to a projected US$3.5 billion this year.
But Mayer told the AP she does not consider her tenure to be a failure. She pointed to a 50 per cent increase in Yahoo’s total worldwide audience to more than one billion users, including 600 million people who now visit on mobile device, three times more than before her arrival.