Verizon to Buy Yahoo for $4.8 Billion
Long-suffering Yahoo will sell its core business to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion, a far cry from the $44.6 billion that Microsoft offered in 2008 and that Yahoo’s board rebuffed. Yahoo shareholders will retain roughly $41 billion in investments in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, plus a portfolio of about 3000 patents valued at about $1 billion. Yahoo began as a Web directory in 1994, later moving into search and then content, but with some stumbles and competition from the likes of Google, Yahoo got lost in the weeds. Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee and later high-ranking executive, was hired as CEO in 2012, but even bold initiatives like the purchase of Tumblr couldn’t stop Yahoo’s downward spiral. Verizon acquired AOL a little over a year ago, and the company has said that it will integrate Yahoo with AOL. It’s the end of an era, and we’re curious to see what Verizon will do with the Yahoo properties, notably Flickr, Tumblr, and Yahoo Finance.
It will also be interesting to see what happens to the relationship that ATT/SBC has with Yahoo as their web email services provider. With Verizon buying Yahoo, it would seem that ATT will become dependent upon a wireless competitor for its webmail service.
verizon got robbed (not that I care, they are a-holes too). yahoo's core business is worth less than $0, so verizon overpaid by $4.8B. Subtract out Alibaba and Yahoo japan from Yahoo and their market cap for the core business is something like -$5B. Mayer was clueless and just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. yahoo's era has been over for a long while already.
I'm mostly interested in what this means for Flickr.