Capital loss in sight for Verizon: the US telecommunications giant would stand for get rid of Aol and Yahoo!, acquired respectively in 2015 and 2017, for an amount however lower than the sum of the total amount spent on the acquisition. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Verizon could obtain a figure of around 4-5 billion from the operation, but it had taken over the assets of AOL for 4,4 billion dollars and those of Yahoo! for 4,5 billion, therefore for a total of about 9 billion.
The two historic telecommunications groups had merged into the Verizon Media division, however causing the parent company writedowns of $4,6 billion at the end of 2018 and the investment, aimed at obtaining a pool of users on which to sell targeted advertising, is now outdated from the point of view of the general strategies of the sector, in addition to never having guaranteed the expected return. Following the indiscretion reported by the WSJ, Verizon opened the session on the New York Stock Exchange positively, where in the first few minutes it gained about 1% to almost 57 dollars per share.
For Verizon this is the confirmation of difficulties that had already emerged before Covid, in one sector, that of dealer, which paid less and less precisely because the giants to bet on had long since become A, the mother of Google, and Facebook.
