Her future at Yahoo has been in flux for some time, and the sale process only strengthened those questions.
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Parties as diverse as Warren Buffett and The Daily Mail were interested in buying Yahoo.
Yahoo now has more than a billion active monthly users, including 600 million monthly active mobile users.
Yahoo will be left with its stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Yahoo Japan Corp, with a combined market value of about $40 billion. They will be spun into a separate, yet-to-be-named, publicly traded company. The deal also excludes some patents and Yahoo’s cash.
However, he said that Verizon has not yet decided what it wants to do in search, an area where Yahoo has waged a losing fight against Google for a decade.
Yahoo Inc’s years-long fight to survive as a standalone company has drawn to a close, internal sources said on Monday.
The move is a big one for Verizon, as it already holds AOL’s portfolio that includes The Huffington Post. She thanked employees for working “day and night” and touted her accomplishments, including tripling the number of consumers using Yahoo products on mobile devices, earning $1 billion in revenue from those mobile products in 2015, up from “basically zero” in 2011, and improved advertising technology. Vox, meanwhile, said the deal “represents a stunning decline” for Yahoo, noting that the company’s other properties have been outshone by its holdings in Alibaba, which past year accounted for a large part of Yahoo’s value.
“The deal speaks to a clear strategy shift at Verizon”, said Craig Moffett, an analyst with MoffettNathanson.
In a statement, Verizon said it expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2017, subject to approval of Yahoo shareholders and regulators. Curiously, however, Mayer doesn’t seem to have her bags packed, as she wrote in a memo published on Tumblr: “I’m planning to stay”.
“It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter”, Mayer said.
While the situation indicates that until those roles are spelt out, Mayer still has a job, a new analysis by Equilar, an executive compensation research and consulting company, estimates a US$218.9 million (A$293 million) golden parachute for her.
Despite its historic place in the country’s tech boom-and-bust cycles, Yahoo! has had six CEOs since it incorporated and each executive had a similar set of challenges – primarily, to stave off the growing competition from Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB) and other tech behemoths that passed by the company. “The press has tried to make it a little more of drama camp, but we come from similar backgrounds”. Add to that another $4 million in vested stock this year, plus $43.4 million in options she could still purchase.
One thing’s for sure: Mayer, a star recruit from Google when she took the helm in 2012, has been paid handsomely during her tenure at the company.
The acquisition will help the telecom company in its efforts to build a media company, she said.
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But Mayer struggled to slow Yahoo’s overall ad sales decline.
