Upon the closing of the $4.8 billion sale of Yahoo to Verizon, Yahoo will see itself renamed to Altaba Inc as it begins its new direction as an investment company.
Complementing the name change will be a new board of directors, with only five individuals claiming a position at the table. Tor Braham, Eric Brandt, Catherine Friedman, Thomas McInerney, and Jeffrey Smith will continue to serve as directors of the company following the acquisition by Verizon, with Brandt serving as chairman of the board.
Current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will miss out on a spot on the new board, despite previously stating she wanted to stay on after the acquisition.
In addition to Mayer, current serving Yahoo board members David Filo, Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill, Jane Shaw, and Maynard Webb will also resign from the board, with Webb to be thereafter known as chairman emeritus of the board.
In its filing to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, Yahoo also explained that following the closing of the purchase by Verizon, Altaba will be required to register and be regulated as an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940.
The multi-billion dollar acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, with the purchase by Verizon not including Yahoo’s cash, its shares in Alibaba Group Holdings, its shares in Yahoo Japan, or Yahoo’s non-core patents, called the Excalibur portfolio. These assets will continue to be held by Yahoo.
“The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising,” Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and CEO said previously.
It is expected Altaba will be integrated with AOL — scooped up by Verizon for $4.4 billion in 2015 — under Marni Walden, EVP and president of the Product Innovation and New Businesses organisation at Verizon.
With Yahoo disclosing in December that more than 1 billion accounts may have been stolen from company systems in another cyber attack, doubts have been lingering over the heads of Verizon executives.
Reuters reported earlier this month that the cyber attack — that actually occurred in August 2013, a year prior to a previously disclosed attack in September 2014 — left Walden confused.
“I can’t sit here today and say with confidence one way or another because we still don’t know,” she is reported to have said at the Citi 2017 Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas.
Mayer said previously she wanted three years to turn the struggling Yahoo around, telling Charlie Rose in a PBS interview last March that her organisation had a strategic plan spanning the same time frame.
“I can see how it will work and how we can actually get to a successful turnaround of Yahoo, but I think that, you know, it’s about our users and it’s about our employees and what’s happening with all of them, and I certainly hope that our services are here a year from now and that they run even better than they do today. I can see that that should easily be the outcome,” she said.
The remarks by the outgoing CEO came after she was asked if she would be running Yahoo a year from March 2015.
“Yahoo is a company that changed the world. Before Yahoo, the internet was a government research project. Yahoo humanised and popularised the web, email, search, real-time media, and more,” Mayer said when previously announcing her intention to stay on after the acquisition.
Updated 10.30 am AEST 10 January 2017: Article was originally headlined: Yahoo to rename as Altaba Inc, tweaks board
