Private equity firm Apollo Global Management has bought Yahoo and Verizon Communications’ other online media properties for $5 billion.
Verizon shed the assets to concentrate on its central business of telecommunications and continue the expansion of its 5G network, which served 230 million people in 2,700 cities in December, the company said.
Apollo plans to strengthen the package of media businesses, which will be grouped under the name Yahoo, into a digital media company poised to compete in the growing market for online advertising.
Verizon will hold 10 percent of the new company.
“We are big believers in the growth prospects of Yahoo and the macro tailwinds” powering growth in online advertising to consumers, David Sambur, Apollo’s co-head of private equity, commented to the Financial Times.
From 2015 into 2017, Verizon paid $9 billion to acquire Yahoo and AOL as flagships for an online media division named Oath. The strategy was to combine content and delivery in a single telecom empire.
However, in 2018 Verizon took a $4.6-billion write-down on its media gamble as competition sharpened and sales and earnings fell short of the company’s expectations.
“During the strategic review process, Apollo delivered the strongest vision and strategy for the next phase of Verizon Media,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said in a statement quoted by the FT.
Verizon’s disappointing foray into digital media is not unique.
In 2018, AT&T bought Time Warner, which owns CNN, HBO, and Warner Brothers, for $85.4 billion to create a market foe for Netflix. However, in January AT&T wrote down $15.5 billion against the purchase as consumers abandoned satellite and cable TV for online streaming services.
TREND FORECAST: We report these mergers and acquisitions to illustrate how the cheap money trend is fueling the buyouts, and how so few companies own so much. Again, the Bigs keep getting bigger and they continue to expand, gaining greater shares of market segments.
However, when the cheap money supply tightens, the M&A activity will dramatically slow down. And when a number of the businesses these highly leveraged firms bought go down, some of the private equity firms will go bust.
