The purchase will happen. Verizon and Yahoo confirm $350 million discount - due to a series of hacker attacks - and will change its name to Altaba
Verizon will pay for Yahoo!'s core businesses $4.48 billion, instead of the expected $4.83 billion. The transaction includes the web activities - e-mail, search engine, messaging services and advertising tools - and some real estate properties of the historical company of Sunnyvale (California).
A really troubled story the acquisition of Yahoo! by Verizon. The U.S. telecommunications giant, at the beginning, had intended to buy the historic web company for $4.83 billion in July last year, before it came to light a series of "skeletons" in the closet of the company led by Marissa Mayer. Yahoo! first kept hidden a maxi cyber attack that took place in 2013 that had involved more than a billion users, an impressive number of people, twice as many as the attack suffered by hackers in 2014, now in the public domain since September last year.
The strategy of Verizon
Verizon, despite everything, wanted to buy Yahoo! and with this discount - agreed between the parties - finally succeeded. The goal of the US telephony giant is clear: to expand its portfolio of online services of which it is, and was, part. Verizon started its "shopping" buying AOL - the historical American internet provider - for 4.4 billion dollars. Now it adds Yahoo! that, as mentioned, in addition to bringing as dowry a search engine, and a pool of users that unfortunately, after the scandals, is certainly decreased, is interesting for its advertising technology, the first to use contextual ads. These two pieces of the puzzle joined together could make Verizon the third world player in online advertising, after Google and Facebook. That's why, despite the scandals, Yahoo! was part of its strategy from the beginning. The closing of the operation is expected in the second quarter of the year and it's not yet clear if Marissa Mayer will leave before the operation is completed or just after. The stock market, by the way, has reacted well to the news of this acquisition: last Friday, Verizon stock rose 0.5% and Yahoo! stock rose 0.4%.