You pay less if the item you’re buying has a couple of dings on it.
Verizon is apparently close to purchasing Yahoo’s Internet properties for roughly $4.8 billion, a price that includes a $250 million discount after the revelation of security breaches at the web company.
Sources close to the store cited the discounted price as well as Yahoo’s possibly being renamed “Altaba Inc.”. An announcement of the new agreement could come in a matter of days or weeks, said the sources. The revised agreement isn’t final and could still change.
Yahoo said in December that cyberthieves in 2013 siphoned information including users’ e-mail addresses, scrambled account passwords and dates of birth. The stolen data may allow criminals to go after more sensitive personal information elsewhere online. The announcement followed news in September of a 2014 breach that affected at least 500 million customer accounts.
Representatives for Yahoo, Verizon and Verizon’s AOL unit declined to comment.
As of January, Yahoo stated that the sale would be delayed until the second quarter while the company assessed the impact of the breaches and met closing conditions. The deal was first announced in July and had been set to wrap in the first quarter of 2017.
Verizon buying Yahoo for its billion users as it tries to expand beyond a maturing wireless and landline business into mobile media and advertising ventures. Verizon had been seeking either a discount or termination of the deal in the wake of the hacks.
Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is under pressure to conclude the deal. Her failure to turn around the company led to a bidding process that Verizon won in July. Mayer was running the company when both of the hacks took place.
Yahoo has stated that it has yet to identify the “intrusion” associated with the theft by a third party in August 2013. The attacks on Yahoo’s system have sparked concerns from regulators and prompted lawsuits. In November, the company said it was cooperating with federal, state, and foreign governmental officials and agencies seeking information about the 2014 hack, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In December, following the admission of a second hack, a White House spokesman said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing the Yahoo hack as well.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via Bloomberg