Verizon selling Yahoo and AOL to Apollo in £3.6 billion deal
3 May 2021, 14:14
Verizon said on Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo.
AOL and Yahoo are being sold again, this time to a private equity firm.
Verizon will sell Verizon Media, which consists of the pioneering tech platforms, to Apollo Global Management, in a five billion US dollar (£3.6 billion) deal.
Verizon said on Monday that it will keep a 10% stake in the new company, which will be called Yahoo.
As part of the deal, Verizon will receive 4.25 billion US dollars (£3.06 billion) in cash, preferred interests of 750 million US dollars (£540 million) and the minority stake.
The transaction includes the assets of Verizon Media, including its brands and businesses such as Yahoo and AOL.
The deal is expected to close in the second half of the year.
Yahoo at the end of the last century was the face of the internet, preceding the behemoth tech platforms to follow, such as Google and Facebook.
AOL was the portal, bringing almost everyone who logged on during the internet’s earliest days.
Verizon had hoped to ride the acquisition of AOL to a quick entry into the mobile market, spending more than four billion dollars (£2.9 billion) on the company in 2015.
The plan was to use the advertising platform pioneered by AOL to sell digital advertising. Two years later, it spent even more to acquire Yahoo and combined the two.
However the speed at which Google and Facebook have grown dashed those hopes and it became clear very quickly that it was unlikely to reach Verizon’s highest aspirations for the two.
The year after buying Yahoo, Verizon wrote down the value of the combined operation, called Oath, by more than the 4.5 billion dollars (£3.24 billion) it had spent on Yahoo.
