Verizon Buys Yahoo! Says The Wall Street Journal

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Verizon and Yahoo! announced that they have struck a $4.8 billion deal, according to the Wall Street Journal. The announcement came on Sunday, prior to Verizon’s scheduled announcement of its quarterly financial results on Tuesday.
“It is a remarkable fall”, said the Wall Street Journal, “for the Silicon Valley web pioneer that once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion at the height of the dot-com boom. The deal is expected to be announced early Monday.”

The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. The news marks the end of the auction process that Yahoo began earlier this year and which involved several interested bidders, including private equity firms according to Inside Business.
The acquisition by Verizon, the largest telecommunications company in the US, also marks the final chapter to the tumultuous story of one of the internet industry’s pioneering companies. Yahoo! was founded in 1994 as one of the first directories to help people navigate the emerging selection of websites.
But Yahoo!’s fortunes began to fade during the past decade, as younger rivals such as Google and Facebook attracted more consumers and advertisers. With the Verizon acquisition, Yahoo! will be led by another former Googler, Tim Armstrong. Armstrong was the CEO of AOL, which Verizon acquired in 2015 and he is expected to lead a newly combined internet group at Verizon consisting of Yahoo! and AOL that brings together online ad technology and other valuable assets, said Inside Business.