#VERIZON YAHOO WRITEDOWN DRIVER#
#VERIZON YAHOO WRITEDOWN LICENSE#

It bought Yahoo for $4.5 billion in 2017 and AOL, which owns HuffPost, for $4.4 billion in 2015. Verizon snapped up a number of legacy media brands in recent years to create Oath. Verizon said Oath's brand was worth $4.8 billion when it last accounted for the company's goodwill valuation. That's a stunning decrease in value since it formed in 2017.

Oath's brand value is now worth just $200 million, according to Verizon. Verizon announced Tuesday that it would take a $4.6 billion writedown on its the media unit, which includes Yahoo and AOL. Because what the executives at the time didn’t know, the future of the company would look less rosy than the optimistic name Yahoo! would suggest.Verizon just admitted that the value of its media brand, Oath, is essentially worthless. Knowing all we have discussed here, accepting the offer by Microsoft would have been the better choice. Yahoo had seriously underinvested in high quality programmers and could not manage to develop a good search engine in-house. Ironically, a partnership was later formed with Microsoft to develop a better search engine. In 2008, a bid of $45 billion by Microsoft was waved off. Purchases of Ebay and YouTube were possible, and even acquiring Apple just two years before the launch of the first iPhone was considered.Īt the same time, good offers to sell the business were denied. There were many other opportunities for acquisitions that could have saved the company but that were not executed. The executives at Yahoo however decided that this 10% increase was too much and again decided to blow off a very important acquisition. It was revealed that the board of directors at Facebook would have forced Zuckerberg to accept an offer of just $100 million more. A bid of $1 billion was denied by Mark Zuckerberg. It was at this time that the company considered the acquisition of Facebook. In the coming years, the market cap of Yahoo showed signs of recovery and climbed back up to a new high in 2006.

#VERIZON YAHOO WRITEDOWN DRIVER#

Search still wasn’t an important driver of profits for Yahoo and the valuation of the company was at an all-time low, so for a second time it was decided not to go through with the acquisition. Page and Brin turned this offer down as they didn’t want to settle for less than $5 billion. Four years later, in 2002, Yahoo attempted to buy Google for $3 billion. These two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, took on his advice and founded a company named Google. Instead of going through with the acquisition, David Filo convinced the two students to start their own company and helped them by arranging introductions with investors.

At the time, Yahoo didn’t generate much revenue from search, and found $1 million too high of a price.

#VERIZON YAHOO WRITEDOWN LICENSE#

In that same year, Yahoo had a chance to license an innovative new search technology created by a pair of Stanford grad students for $1 million. Within five years after starting the company, it was worth more than Ford, Chrysler and General Motors combined. In 1998 Yahoo had expanded its product offering with an e-mail service, weather reports, maps, and much more. Dropbox for example, now an $11 billion company, was founded over 13 years later in 2007. At the time such a service was very novel and the company was way ahead of its time. Briefcase was an online storage service that allowed users to store their digital files on the internet. It all started in January 1994 when Stanford graduates David Filo and Jerry Yang launched Yahoo Briefcase. The story of this company once adored by investors is one of great opportunity and even greater failure. The price now paid is only a fraction of the $100+ billion valuation the company received during the dot-com mania. The acquisition of the internet company is an interesting move, as the collapse of yahoo’s value over time has been both stunning and unique. The American telecom company initially acquired Yahoo to deliver digital advertising services but had to write down the value of the acquired company as much as $5 billion in 2018 due to strong competition from Google and Facebook. Earlier last month it was announced that Verizon sold Yahoo to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, for $5 billion.

Verizon yahoo writedown