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. That would be Mayer’s severance pay if the new owners of Yahoo decide to let her go and replace her with another CEO.
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Yahoo was founded as a web directory in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo.
Current Yahoo shareholders will keep the company’s lucrative investments in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, which will be spun into a separate, yet-to-be-named, publicly traded company. Buying Yahoo is a smart move for Verizon. Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL will cater to more than 1 billion customers globally after the joint operation takes off. Post acquisition, Verizon is slated to double the size of its Internet advertising business.
It must be noted that Verizon has earlier bought AOL for Dollars 4.4 billion past year.
The deal with Verizon, which is subject to approval by Yahoo’s shareholders, regulatory and other approvals, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017. Because of redundancies between the Yahoo and Verizon workforces, layoffs at Yahoo are likely, perhaps hitting up to 1 in 5 workers, Gold said.
Meanwhile, traditional web banner advertising, long Yahoo’s strength, has become much less lucrative in the age of mobile and video.
If Verizon fully owned Yahoo right now, it would generate about $3.6 billion in U.S.ad revenue this year to eclipse Microsoft for third place in the market, based on eMarketer’s estimates.
Five bidders submitted offers in the final round, CNBC reported last week.
– Yahoo was once the leading search engine for the internet but it has been overtaken by Google, which launched in 1998.
Yahoo says it has more than 1 billion users, though Outsell analyst Randy Giusto believes only about 200 million are habitual visitors.
But Verizon appeared to be the leading candidate because of its ability to integrate AOL’s advertising technology into Yahoo services. Yahoo had been struggling to adjust to what people wanted, and even with various CEOs just couldn’t get a large share of the market despite its innovations (and purchases of other companies). Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan are estimated to be valued at $31.2 billion and $8.3 billion respectively. The remainder of Yahoo will be a holding company for its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan investments, as well as its patent portfolio.
Kay said Verizon “is an uninnovative company, very different from the software-oriented world” from which Yahoo comes.
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While Yahoo has been successful in building a global audience of as many as one billion worldwide, “it hasn’t been able to change and adjust its brand as the market has changed”, VanBoskirk told AFP.
