Yahoo hasn’t exactly been doing great in recent years but after numerous troubling financial results and the discovery of an enormous data breach from 2014 that affected 500 million users, it seemed that the US Internet giant will finally catch a break. Namely, Verizon has been on the verge of acquiring Yahoo’s core business for $4.8 billion for a few months now but the situation just got a lot more complicated. Not surprisingly, the largest wireless carrier in the country is now looking to renegotiate the terms of its potential purchase, New York Post reports.
The reasons for Verizon’s hesitance aren’t difficult to grasp. Yahoo’s stocks and brand value have been steadily declining ever since the company admitted to the aforementioned data breach and it was only a few days later that it came to light Yahoo was scanning emails of its customers while under orders of either the NSA or the FBI. Sources close to Verizon are now claiming that Tim Armstrong, the CEO of the carrier’s subsidiary AOL has recently been pushing for a new round of negotiations with Yahoo amidst all of the brand damage that Yahoo has suffered in recent weeks.
If you’re wondering why the CEO of AOL has a say in the matter, it’s been widely reported that Verizon has been primarily interested in purchasing Yahoo in order to merge it with AOL and create a new Internet giant which would be competing in the online advertising business. Namely, Verizon and all of the other wireless carriers in the country have been looking into alternative revenue streams for quite a while now and most of them concluded that there’s still money to be made in the online advertising business. More information on the deal is expected to follow soon as New York Post reports that Armstrong has already been in Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California for a few days now. It’s now expected that Armstrong will try to use recent developments and Yahoo’s situation in order to strong-arm the company’s executives into giving Verizon a significant discount on its core assets. An update is expected in two weeks at most as that’s when Yahoo’s board is scheduled to officially meet next.