A Verizon logo, in a file image.Paul Sakuma / AP
The US telecommunications giant Verizon is one step away from selling Yahoo and AOL for $ 5 billion (4.15 billion euros) to the Apollo Global Management venture capital fund.
The operation, of which there is still no official confirmation, will put an end to Verizon's adventure in the media business and the creation of content to compete with the big ones of the Internet, although the company would keep a tenth of the partnership resulting.
The agreement with Apollo represents a 180-degree turn for the telephone operator with respect to the strategy undertaken in the past decade, which involved increasing its positions beyond its usual range of action: the sale of voice and data plans.
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That amendment to the whole will pay heavy losses. In 2015, Verizon paid $ 4.4 billion for AOL - one of the pioneers in the Internet industry - with the desire to create a platform to distribute digital content through mobile devices and attract advertisers. So he wanted his share in a market that was booming. A little over a year later, in the summer of 2016, he paid another 4.83 billion dollars for Yahoo, another of the brands that two decades earlier had become the great gateway to the Internet and that little by little had lost ground. in a market with an increasingly oligopolistic structure, in which Google and Facebook have everything to win. And in which all the battles of the telecommunications companies to fight the scepter have been, to date, with defeats.
Little more than five years later, both operations will be settled with red numbers. Verizon will receive for both subsidiaries and for its technology business for the Internet advertising sector, for just over half of what it paid then. The goal is just the opposite of what it was looking for with both purchases: to focus on its traditional business and dedicate the resources obtained to accelerate the deployment of 5G in the United States.