Verizon Communications Inc. is near a revised deal to purchase one of the core internet businesses of Yahoo Inc. for around $250 million $350 million less than the original agreed price of $4.83.
Verizon has been persuading Yahoo since 2016 to amend the terms of the acquisition agreement to include the economic damage from two cyber-attacks. The deal will result in Verizon and Yahoo sharing the liability from potential lawsuits related to the data breaches, a source told international news agency, Reuters.
Bloomberg has reported on Wednesday that another person familiar with the situation said that the price cut was probably going to be around $250 million.
Senior equity analyst at Edward Jones, Dave Heger, said that “Maybe this isn't quite as much of a discount as initially thought, but it's at least something.”
Verizon hopes to merge Yahoo’s search, email and messenger assets as well as its advertising technology tools with its AOL unit, which Verizon bought for $4.4 billion in 2015. Verizon is taking a look at mobile video and advertising as new potential sources of revenue.
But ever since disclosing the largest known data breach in history, Yahoo has been under close examination by federal investigators and lawmakers. The disclosure was made merely months after another separate attack was disclosed.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent out a probe into whether Yahoo should have let the public know of the breaches that happened in 2013 and 2014 sooner.
The shares of Verizon went down 0.7 percent to $47.93 while Yahoo’s shares went up 1.5 percent to $45.69.