Yahoo plots return to public markets

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Yahoo, one of the internet’s oldest and best-known brands that had once been a dotcom stock market darling, is planning to return to the public markets.

Chief executive Jim Lanzone told the Financial Times his goal was to take the company to an IPO again as part of a plan to return the Silicon Valley based group to prominence.

Yahoo was “ready financially, the company has a great balance sheet, we’re very profitable,” he said. But Lanzone added that being private allowed the company to make necessary structural changes, creating a series of business units similar to the model used when he was head of CBS Interactive.

Lanzone, the former chief executive of Tinder, was brought in after the spinout of the group from Verizon in September 2021 to reestablish the group as an independent company.

Verizon, which acquired Yahoo and AOL in two transactions in 2015 and 2017, sold both to private equity firm Apollo in a deal valued at $5bn in September 2021 after incurring significant losses under its ownership. 

Verizon had put both under the “Oath” brand as part of a strategy at the time to diversify away from its telecoms business into media, but was forced to write down the businesses and sell them at close to half the price it paid.

For Yahoo, the sale signified a fall from grace having lost popularity and internet market share to groups like Google and Facebook in the 2000s.

Yahoo first became a public company in April 1996 and quickly became one of the most popular sites for web users in the world with its combination of search and email, turning down a $47bn bid from Microsoft in 2008.

But Yahoo still ranks in the top five globally in total traffic, according to Lanzone, “even after all this time, and after six years of being owned by a telecoms company”.

It has more than 30 titles or business units, the biggest of which are branded as Yahoo such as finance, sports, news and mail, alongside other sites such as start up news site TechCrunch.

Yahoo benefited as a long term brand that had always stood as “people’s trusted guide through the digital wilderness of the internet,” he said. “Whether it’s finance, or sports or news, that’s still what we do, and why we’re number one, or number two, in all these important categories all these years later”.

Lanzone said that Verizon had used the Yahoo brand to help further the objectives of its telecoms business, but that this was different from supporting its own aims. “It was deployed for their business plan, not for what ours would be on the standalone base.”

He added: “[This] is something we could do for 50 or 100 years. While the company has had struggles in different points in time, we’re still huge in traffic, and we have our best days ahead of us product wise.”

The company would seek M&A opportunities in related sectors where it was yet to build a business, he added. “We’ll be aggressive at looking at those,” he said.

Yahoo recently acquired sport betting app Wagr to add to its sports businesses. “There’s a lot that we’re going to do against every vertical we already own. We’ve already been involved in the M&A process.”

He said that the group was still top three in search [but] “too small at this point” to compete against Google and Microsoft’s Bing. “Hopefully, we can earn our way back there,” added Lanzone. “I’m pretty optimistic about what we can do. And I think AI presents a new opportunity across every one of the products.”