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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."

9 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Verizon is smart to do this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is nothing sweeter than those juicy Geocities page views. That's the crown jewel as far as I'm concerned.

    1. 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.

    2. Re: Verizon is smart to do this. by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ah. I'd assumed Verizon were getting paid to take them.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Re:Really Meyers thinks she is staying? by Jahta · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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."

    Presumably she means Chapter 11.

  3. Re:Marissa Mayer can't leave by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Twitter should be the next one to watch. They've only got around $550m in assets and just blew $200m on a tech company to fold into theirs, that of course led to a very small stock bump of around $1.25/share, which is already declining. Keep in mind they're burning through around $125m yearly in losses. Anyone want to take a bet who will buy them up? I can't think of any company that would, especially with the self-imposed trashing of their own brand they've been going on for the last year.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...
  4. Re:thats by GrumpySteen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) Fiorina has not declared bankruptcy.
    2) HP did not declare bankruptcy under Fiorina.
    3) Hillary Clinton has not had to declare bankruptcy.

    Meanwhile, Trump has had four bankruptcies and is the subject of multiple class action suits over the scam that was Trump University.

    If the only choice is between a disaster that doesn't bankrupt the country and an apocalypse that does, I'll take the disaster.

  5. Saddest = Nokia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Melissa will get a big bonus most likely paid by the new owners, because they'll have paid her a bonus to encourage her to do the deal.
    Very similar to the deal Elop got for gutting Nokia, locking it into a Microsoft world where it was doomed to fail and yet he got a big fat bonus (paid from the *merged* company, i.e. from Microsoft) for doing the deed.

    To me Nokia was far sadder, it went from the top slot in the smartphone industry to virtually bankrupt in the space of one obviously malicious CEO. Whereas Yahoo was vapour valuation to less vapour in one obviously incompetent CEO.

    http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/the-sun-tzu-of-nokisoftian-microkia-mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-whose-the-baddest-of-them-all-waterloo.html

  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. Re:Summary is jacked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I thought the $125 billion evaluation was of its core business back around the year 2000 or so, and predated the Alibaba investment. So the core business was valued at $125 billion, now the core business is valued around $5 billion. Neither number includes Alibaba.