As forecasted in a number of media reports, Yahoo this week announced the company would lay off 107 employees effective April 11, according to Business Insider.
In an earnings call earlier this month, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer indicated that overall job cuts could impact around 15% of the company’s approximately 11,000 employees.
This is just the latest shake up at Yahoo, which is considering a sale of its Internet business, which includes the search feature along with Yahoo News, Yahoo Mail, social media site Tumblr and other holdings.
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money, confirmed the carrier’s interest in a potential acquisition of Yahoo.
The discussion started with talk about Verizon’s acquisition of AOL. Last year Verizon paid $4.4 billion for AOL with an eye on boosting its LTE wireless video business, its “over-the-top” video offerings and creating “a growth platform from wireless to IoT for consumers and businesses.”
“We had to really transform ourself,” McAdam said of Verizon in 2015. “We bought AOL. We think that can turn into a real growth engine for us.”
“Why not add Yahoo,” Cramer asked, noting that the company was nearly being “given away. You can’t rule it out. It’s too good a property.”
“We said we would look at it,” McAdam said. “We have to understand the trends that we’re seeing in some of their results now. At the right price, I think marrying up some of [Yahoo’s] assets with AOL…would be a good thing. One of the things we did [with AOL]was keep it separate from the core company. We have been feeding information from out mobile subscribers into the AOL engine. We’ve only had it six months at this point…I don’t want to declare victory; we’ve got a long way to go. Perhaps some things from Yahoo might make sense. I think we can turn [AOL] into something special.”
