Verizon to Buy Yahoo for $4.8B

News Analysis Elizabeth Miller Coyne, Managing Editor 7/24/2016

Verizon Communications plans to announce Monday that it's acquiring Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Yahoo's board voted Sunday to sell its Internet business and land holdings to the incumbent service provider, according to a Bloomberg report on Sunday.

Once worth $125 billion at the height of the tech boom in 2000, post-sale-Yahoo will be left with its $41 billion investment in Alibaba, Yahoo Japan and a small portfolio of patents, said The New York Times.

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) has been in decline since 2009. Marissa Mayer, who was hired in 2013, failed to turn the company around. She is not expected to hang around after the deal closes -- and will leave with $57 million in severance.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) plans to combine Yahoo's operations with AOL, which it bought last year, and use Yahoo's content and advertising technology to boost its service offering to customers and advertisers. (See Verizon's AOL Buy Completes Its Content Story.)

According to Bloomberg, Verizon will announce the deal before the market opens on Monday morning.

Light Reading's editors have been predicting the deal since early this year.

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— Elizabeth Miller Coyne, Managing Editor, Light Reading