Tech industry’s former darling Yahoo has certainly seen better days. After boasting a $100 billion valuation at its peak in 2000 and refusing to sell to Microsoft for $45 billion in 2008, the company has now decided that getting $4.8 billion that Verizon is offering for its core business is a good-enough offer. To be honest, after recently admitting to a massive data breach which compromised half a billion users back in 2014, Yahoo’s board probably sees that offer as more than just good enough. Unfortunately for them, so does Verizon.
Speaking to a small group of reporters this Thursday, Verizon’s General Counsel Craig Silliman described Yahoo’s breach as a significant event with likely material consequences. Of course, Silliman was referring to the market value of the company’s assets. When you’re running a huge web service with hundreds of millions of users and compromise their data, it’s likely that a significant portion of those users will decide to stop using your service. If that happens, the market value of your service will obviously drop. To speak in less abstract terms, the said web service is an important part of the package Yahoo is trying to sell to Verizon. While the largest US wireless carrier obviously isn’t happy with recent developments, it’s not surprising that it’s trying to find the silver lining in this entire ordeal. In other words, it’s looking to lower the price of its purchase.
Yahoo would obviously like to prevent that from happening, and so the Internet firm has cancelled its upcoming earnings call scheduled for next Tuesday, October 18th. Naturally, the company will still report its earnings for the third quarter of the year, this just means there won’t be a teleconference discussing the report afterwards. The official reason for this decision is the “pending transaction with Verizon”, as stated by Yahoo’s press release published earlier today. If you’re wondering how is Verizon’s potential acquisition of Yahoo related to all of this, the answer is rather simple. A potential earnings call would just provide industry analysts with an opportunity to ask questions about the 2014 hack, not to mention the pending federal investigation into the matter. Yahoo is obviously trying to minimize chances of saying something which would give Verizon more ammunition to drive down the price of its core business and the best way to do that is to say nothing.