Yahoo Inc has revealed that the company would change the name to Altaba Inc and the current CEO Marissa Mayer will resign from the board after finalizing the deal with Verizon. According to sources, Mayer will continue to serve Yahoo’s core business in a bid to allow smooth transformation of the takeover.
Based on the information sourced from a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the total number of board members of Altaba will be five. Meanwhile, Yahoo co-founder David Filo will also resign from the board along with Mayer. With effect from January 9, Eric Brandt will become the chairman of the board of the newly formed company.
The recent development has put an end to the uncertainty over the Yahoo-Verizon deal. According to analysts, both companies have made significant progress in the merger agreement.
Yahoo-Verizon deal sealed in July 2016
In July 2016, Yahoo inked a deal with Verizon to merge the Internet business, digital advertising, web based email for $4.83 billion. Moreover, the company will also acquire all the media assets with AOL as part of the deal.
Even though all aspects were good for quite some time after the official announcement, the deal went into uncertainty. Meanwhile, Yahoo alleged that the deal with Verizon was badly hit due to two data breaches.
Yahoo user accounts heavily compromised multiple times
In 2014, nearly 500 million user accounts of Yahoo were compromised. Recently, the company revealed that over a billion user accounts were heavily compromised way back in 2013. In the meantime, Verizon added that the company is investigating the data breaches. However, the company is confident that the deal will go through since there the core business model of Yahoo is strong.
In a recently filed regulatory listing, Yahoo confirmed that with the activation of the deal, five other directors would also tender their resignations. The remaining directors will oversee the operations of Altaba. Interestingly, Altaba is a holding company which has 15 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and 35.5 percent in Yahoo Japan.
During the dot-com boom period, the total valuation of Yahoo was pegged at $125 billion. However, the company lost the plot during the middle with the emergence of Google and Gmail.
The efforts to refresh the company failed several times. Yahoo was the most popular destinations on the web from 1990 to 2001. With Yahoo, many people got the benefit from the internet with information in the form of news, music, and content. The fortunes of Yahoo got faded with the rapid growth of Google during 2003 and Gmail in 2005.
