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Once Valued at $125B, Yahoo's Web Assets To Be Sold To Verizon For $4.83B, Companies Confirm

Posted by msmash on from the big-shark-small-shark dept.

The reports were spot on. Verizon Communications on Monday announced that it plans to purchase Yahoo's Web assets for a sum of $4.83 billion in cash. The multi-billion dollars deal will get Verizon Yahoo's core internet business and some real estate. The announcement also marks a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer, which once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion. For Verizon, the deal adds another piece to the mammoth digital media and advertising empire it owns. The deal is expected to close early 2017. CNBC reports: The transaction is seen boosting Verizon's AOL internet business, which the company acquired last year for $4.4 billion, by giving it access to Yahoo's advertising technology tools, as well as other assets such as search, mail, messenger and real estate. It also marks the end of Yahoo as an operating company, leaving it only as the owner of a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, as well as its 15 percent interest in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. In December, Yahoo scrapped plans to spin off its Alibaba stake after investors worried about whether that transaction could have been carried out on a tax-free basis. It instead decided to explore a sale of its core assets, spurred on by activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Forbes has called it one of the "saddest $5B deals in tech history."Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was expected to leave -- or get fired -- said she intends to stay. "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer said in a note on Yahoo's Tumblr page. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

12 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by bloodhawk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think much of Verizon but I would be fucking shocked if Meyers arse isn't on the sidewalk 10 seconds after it goes through. Yahoo was on its way down, but she put the peddle to the floor and accelerated it into oblivion.

    1. Re: Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm sure the participation trophy CEO will be just fine. All the people who actually work there whose lives got ruined are another story but in the US workers are irrelevant anyway to most people including other workers.

    2. Re:Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Bearhouse · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're right, she should go, having added no value. But I'm sure she negotiated a sweet deal with stakeholders as part of the overall package.
      (BTW, this is not an anti-fem rant; plenty of good female and bad male bosses out there, and while I'm here let me extend a hearty "fuck you" to all the SJWs trying to ruin /.)
      Back on topic, quite what she means by "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter..." one can only speculate.
      Selling the remaining minority interests they have? That'll be done by the bankers, my dear, they don't need you.
      Talking of banks, she's crying all the way to one:
      Salary $117 million over 5 years; $36.6 million for first six months.
      Net worth US$500 million

  2. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yahoo is fifteen year old irrelevant garbage. Their search engine is junk and just littered with ads. They aren't worth 4.3 thousand let alone billion. Their site looks like a 1998 Netscape demo.

  3. wait, what? by ihtoit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Where did Verizon find 5 billion in *cash*?? Inside the mattress??

    --
    Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
    1. Re: wait, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Bullshit. What you meant to say is that corporations might actually have to pay taxes to the nation that enables them to work internationally in the first place. We guard their overseas assets with our military, threaten any leaders of countries who think their assets should benefit their people, and generally allow them to externalize costs and internalize profits.

      Corporations need to be made to behave and pay their own expenses. That they're not being made to is why the world is fucked.

  4. Re:Selling for $5B is sexist by 110010001000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow! A whole 10%! What a disaster...oh by the way, you were subsidizing the poors healthcare anyway. Where do you think it came from? The magic fairy tree?

  5. I care too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    1. Marissa Mayer: "For me personally, I'm planning to stay, I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

    2. Marissa Mayer's salary is $117 million over 5 years; $36.6 million for first six months.

    3. For that sort of money I'd love and offer to stick around because "It's important to me" too.

    4. "It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter." That would be Chapter 11, Amirte?

  6. Re:thats by Keick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fact is neither Clinton nor Trump have ever declared personal bankruptcy.

    Yes at least 4 businesses owned/run by Donald Trump have filed bankruptcy, and likely a few more.

    http://www.rollingstone.com/po...

    But have you bothered to look up how many businesses Trump owns and/or runs? The answer is over 500. That's a whole lot of successes for relatively few failures. Even conservatively, 95% of his businesses were/are successful.

    http://qz.com/461688/a-list-of...

    So your choice is really; Some loud mouth bozo with a 95% success rate in running businesses of all types, or a useless puppet with not a single success in her life.

  7. Summary is jacked by justthinkit · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Current Yahoo shareholders will keep the company's lucrative investments in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. They will be spun into a separate, yet-to-be-named, publicly traded company. The deal also excludes some patents and Yahoo's cash.

    In short, the deal doesn't include Alibaba shares, which are the lion's share of Yahoo!'s value. So, mentioning the $125B value in the summary, not clarifying what the deal is, but saying the deal is for $5B, is ...pretty typical for a Slashdot summary.

    --
    I come here for the love
  8. Re:One of the oldest sites on the internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe you young'ns can't remember, but I remember when you had to access Yahoo by an IP address (since DNS wasn't a thing then), and then all it really was, was a directory of links to other sites that existed. No such thing as a search engine back then.

    The founders capitalized on that, and at one point, Yahoo was the biggest, best thing on the world wide web. Then they decided that the "portal" thing was the way to go, and after that, it was kinda downhill from there.

    And then Google came and ate their lunch, and after that were a series of terrible CEOs that didn't understand the company at all (probably because there was no cohesive strategy to understand -- they grew too rapidly at the start for that).

    Bye Bye Yahoo. You were great for a little while in the early days, and I appreciated what you did for the web. But I don't think you were ever meant to be a commercial venture, and essentially that was your downfall.

    More like DNS wasnt a thing in whatever world you lived in... DNS (early mid 80's) was in use far before HTTP (late 80s/early 90's) existed. The yahoo/lycos/ask jeeves sites (mid 90's) didn't exist until after HTTP was more widely used.

  9. Re:thats by tnk1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, I'm not planning on voting for Trump and would prefer that no one did, but I'd have to ask, of those businesses that Trump went bankrupt on, perhaps all four of them were phone-ins too?

    The business world does have ups and downs, and if you're a major player you're going to have them. Even Warren Buffett has the occasional bankruptcy in one or two of his holdings.

    So, I think I agree that using something like the four bankruptcies (which in this case were Chapter 11 reorganizations, not liquidations), against Trump is magnifying a certain expected level of failure or error into a big deal. If he really does have 500 investments, then is four bankruptcies actually a big deal?

    I actually think Trump needs to be taken very seriously as someone who knows exactly what they are doing, and I'd probably vote for Clinton if I didn't think she'd only make the problem worse. And that's a big deal, because I think the Democratic party platform is divisive and pandering, just like the Republican party platform, they just have fewer rednecks. Electing her is going to keep the pressure cooker from exploding one more term or two, but that just means the explosion is going to be even greater when she's done. She has nothing to help with this current situation, and the DNC mails only show the level of tone-deafness that her and the rest of the Democratic party are experiencing.