Yahoo CEO says the company plans a return to the public markets

By Barbara Kollmeyer

Yahoo is 'very profitable,' Chief Executive Jim Lanzone reportedly tells the Financial Times

Yahoo, an early trailblazer of the Internet boom, is "very profitable," and ready to return to public markets via an initial public offering.

That's according to Chief Executive Jim Lanzone, who made the comment in an interview with the Financial Times published Tuesday. Yahoo soared to prominence in the 1990s, rising in the public consciousness alongside its share price -- under the ticker symbol "YHOO" -- during the dot-com boom.

Apollo Funds purchased the Yahoo business from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) in 2021.

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The web services provider, which competes with the likes of Google parent Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL)and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META), said earlier this year that more than 20% of its workforce would be laid off. At the time, Lanzone reportedly said that the cuts would be made in an unprofitable area of its business but that they would be "tremendously beneficial" to the company overall.

"Whether it's finance, or sports or news, that's still what we do, and why we're No. 1, or No. 2, in all these important categories all these years later," Lanzone reportedly told the FT. "While the company has had struggles [at] different points in time, we're still huge in traffic, and we have our best days ahead of us productwise."

He said Yahoo would be aggressively looking at the chance to build businesses in related sectors via M&A -- it recently bought Wagr, a sports-betting app. While Yahoo is still "too small" to take on Google and Microsoft's (MSFT) search engine Bing, Lanzone said he's optimistic, and also sees AI offering up new opportunities for the company.

-Barbara Kollmeyer

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07-04-23 1207ET

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