Verizon has completed its acquisition of Yahoo for roughly $4.5 billion. On June 16, Yahoo will change its name to Altaba, a holding company with a 15% stake in Alibaba and a 36% stake in Yahoo Japan, with Thomas J. McInerney at the helm. Verizon plans to integrate Yahoo with AOL to create a media subsidiary called Oath, per reports.
At the height of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo enjoyed a roughly $140 billion market cap. And it has spent a good bit of cash down the years, making deals as the ground around it shifted and the internet became an ad-revenue-generating space leveraging new forms of media. One example is Yahoo’s disastrous $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr in 2013, a year during which Yahoo completed an eye-watering 29 M&A transactions in total, per the PitchBook Platform.
Yahoo’s completed M&A transactions
The result of Yahoo’s plethora of M&A deals? The early pioneer in search engines has transformed into a stable of media brands. And that’s just what prompted Verizon to come a-courting last year. So, how does Yahoo’s sticker price stack up against the sums paid for other media companies acquired this decade? Check out where Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo ranks in the top media M&A deals completed since the start of 2010:
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Article by Adam Putz, PitchBook
