Yahoo to sell core biz to Verizon for $4.8bn

USA: The board of Yahoo has agreed to sell its core assets to Verizon, according to a New York Times report. The official announcement is yet to come. Verizon beat AT&T, PE giant TPG and a consortium led by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, who were also in the fray to buy Yahoo.

The deal includes Yahoo’s core internet operations and land holdings, according to the report. The company’s patents will be sold separately, as well as its multi-billion-dollar stakes in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan.

Verizon might combine Yahoo’s operations with AOL, a longtime Yahoo competitor that Verizon bought last year for $4.4 billion.

Yahoo was founded by Stanford graduates, Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 as a directory of other websites, and grew rapidly thereafter to become the most popular starting point for web users.

Microsoft offered to buy the company $44.6 billion in 2008, which Yahoo rejected. But started look for buyers as it lost its ground to Google and Facebook eventually, after failed attempts to buy both.

Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer as president and CEO in 2012, but she could not do much to stop the company from collapsing.