Tag Archives: Altaba

BREAKING: Yahoo is officially dead, to be named Altaba.

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Yahoo Inc said  that it would rename itself Altaba Inc and Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer would step down from the board after the closing of its deal with Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N).

Yahoo has a deal to sell its core internet business, which includes its digital advertising, email and media assets, to Verizon for 4.83 billion dollars.

The terms of that deal could be amended – or the transaction may even be called off – after Yahoo last year disclosed two separate data breaches; one involving some 500 million customer accounts and the second involving over a billion.

Verizon executives have said that while they see a strong strategic fit with Yahoo, they are still investigating the data breaches.

Five other Yahoo directors would also resign after the deal closes, Yahoo said in a regulatory filing.

The remaining directors will govern Altaba, a holding company whose primary assets will be a 15 per cent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd ( BABA.N) and 35.5 per cent stake in Yahoo Japan.

The new company also named Eric Brandt chairman of the board, effective Jan. 9.

Although, many also believed that somehow Yahoo will come through and survive, especially after Marissa Mayer, a rockstar engineer at Google, took over the role of CEO at Yahoo a few years ago.

Well, all of this is over now. And if you too, just like us, trying to figure out what it all means and what all has happened, here are 10 key developments that you need to know about.

  1. Yahoo, once the Verizon deal is complete, won’t be known as Yahoo. Instead “the Board determined that, following the Closing, it intends to cause the Company’s name to be changed to Altaba Inc.” This quote, by the way, is from the submission that Yahoo has made to SEC in the US.
  2. The size of the company board will be reduced to 5. These five directors will be: Tor Braham, Eric Brandt, Catherine Friedman, Thomas McInerney and Jeffrey Smith. Brandt will serve as Chairman of the Board.
  3. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is leaving. “She intends to resign from the Board effective upon the Closing, and her intention to resign is not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices,” notes the SEC filing.
  4. David Filo, who co-founded Yahoo, is also leaving the company’s board. End of the era, as we noted earlier.
  5. Yahoo’s web services have been sold to Verizon. This means once the deal completes, all those Yahoo Mail and Messenger etc will be operated by Verizon.
  6. The remaining Yahoo — now known as Altaba — will be mostly an investment firm. The company will have stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. It also has some assets in the form intellectual property.
  7. The name Altaba kind of rhymes with Alibaba, a Chinese web giant. Yahoo aka Altaba holds a 15 per cent stake in Alibaba. It is worth over $30 billion.
  8. Verizon last year had announced that it will buy Yahoo’s web properties in a deal worth $4.8 billion. Although after the recent disclosure of security breaches at Yahoo, some questioned whether it still made sense for Verizon to go ahead with the deal. But so far it looks like the deal is all done.
  9. Yahoo, once an internet giant, failed to capitalise on the internet advertising boom, something that made Google one of the top companies in the world. Its search engine efforts failed and it could not meet the challenge from Google. As its last try, Yahoo brought Mayer from Google. But even she couldn’t save it.
  10. Yahoo started in 1994 and became one of the top web companies. There was a time when everyone was using a Yahoo email and was chatting on the Yahoo Messenger. People even had Yahoo Geocities accounts, which were like blog pages. Yahoo was big. And then Google happened.