US internet firm Yahoo has being acquired by American telecoms giant Verizon Communications for nearly $5bn (£3.8bn) in cash.
Yahoo will be combined with AOL, another faded internet star, which Verizon bought last year.
Not included in the deal: Yahoo’s 15% stake in Chinese retailing giant Alibaba, worth $32 billion, and its 36% stake in Yahoo Japan, worth about $8 billion. When the transaction closes — which is expected in the first quarter of 2017 — Yahoo will change its name and become a publicly traded investment company, the company said.
The price tag for the deal is well below the $44bn Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008 or the $125bn it was worth during the dot.com boom.
Verizon said the deal for Yahoo’s core internet business, which has more than a billion active users a month, would make it a global mobile media company.
“For advertisers, it creates a third platform of scale,” said Robert Peck, an Internet equity analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. “Right now, you only have two of them, which are Google and Facebook. Advertisers are looking for another platform of scale that can reach mass audiences, and this creates that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment