According to latest reports, Verizon might be close in acquiring Yahoo’s core business for an amount in the region of $5 billion.
Expected to be announced in the next few days, the deal will most likely bring an end to the tumultuous stint of CEO Marissa Mayer, who has evidently failed to re-invent Yahoo into an independent company.
This deal would also mean that the nation’s largest wireless carrier would add the iconic web pioneer and its millions of daily users to a growing stable of media properties.
Though the massive deal doesn’t include Yahoo’s patents at this stage of negotiations, it does include its real estate assets, said sources close to the development. The non-core sale of the intellectual property assets will be sold separately and is not expected to be finished for another month at least. They could fetch ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’.
The deal, ironically, would also bring old colleagues Mayer and Verizon’s AOL key executive Tim Armstrong face to face, who used to work together at Google years ago. It was hardly two years ago when Mayer had rejected
Armstrong’s efforts to merge the two companies. AOL went with Verizon, which would now be swallowing up Yahoo.
Brian Wieser, who is an analyst with Pivotal Research, is of the opinion that combining AOL with Yahoo would create a stronger No. 3 digital platform for online advertising, after Google and Facebook.
“This is a 1 plus 1 equals 2½,” he said.
No final deal has been reached and the talks could still falter. One of the other finalists in the Yahoo auction process could also re-emerge with a higher bid.
