By Katie Davis Y ahoo Inc. which is an American multinational tech- nology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California globally known for its Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo!. The company was in the process of auctioning off its search and advertising business. Yahoo was very tight lipped about the process before a deal was reached basi- cally saying that they are making “great progress on stra- tegic alternatives,” but did not comment further on the auction process. Well it is now known that Verizon Communications Inc was the winning bidder over the other four companies bidding in the final round for Yahoo. The $4.8 billion dollar deal by Verizon Communications Inc beat out offers by Quicken
Loans Inc founder, Dan Gilbert, Vector Capital Manage- ment, AT&T Inc and private equity suitor TPG.
Verizon’s latest deal follows a similar one last year when the company acquired AOL for $4.4 billion to boost its media and advertising businesses. Verizon remains a giant telecom company, but the acquisitions of AOL and now Yahoo show that the company wants to diversify its revenue and operations. Once the deal closes, Verizon has made it very clear that it wants to merge Yahoo and AOL to form a bigger advertis- ing and media subsidiary. This way, AOL gets more scale and reaches enough internet and mobile users to become an advertising giant reaching hundreds of millions or even billions of people globally.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • AUGUST 2016
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