Yahoo Plans to Become Public Company Again

Yahoo’s days as a private company could be coming to an end.

The tech company’s CEO told the Financial Times Monday (July 4) that he hopes to take Yahoo public and return it to its former glory.

Yahoo is “ready financially, the company has a great balance sheet, we’re very profitable,” Jim Lanzone said in an interview.

He added that Yahoo benefited from being a private company, as it was able to make needed structural changes.

Yahoo was sold by former owner Verizon to private equity firm Apollo in a $5 billion deal in 2021. As the FT report noted, the sale was a fall from grace for the company, which had lost both popularity and its place in the market to companies like Facebook and Google.

Lanzone argues that Yahoo still ranks in the top five companies worldwide in total traffic, “even after all this time, and after six years of being owned by a telecoms company.”

Yahoo has a number of titles and businesses under its name, including “Yahoo Mail” and “Yahoo Sports,” and owns other sites such as TechCrunch.

In April, Yahoo announced it had acquired peer-to-peer sports betting app Wagr to expand its sports fantasy platform.

The deal made Nashville-based Wagr — the first social sports betting operator to receive a license in the U.S. — a fully-integrated part of Yahoo Sports.

Jon Shaw, senior vice president of Yahoo Sports, said the deal allows his company to expand into new group formats and improve engagement.

“While we know our fantasy leagues increase fan engagement and give people something to root for, the real value is in keeping friend groups together through competition and camaraderie around the sports they love,” Shaw said.

Lanzone told the FT the company is exploring other mergers and acquisitions and spoke of one day being able to compete against Google and Microsoft’s Bing in search.

“I’m pretty optimistic about what we can do. And I think AI presents a new opportunity across every one of the products,” he said.

Both Google and Microsoft are working to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their searches, amid what PYMNTS has described as “generative AI’s rapid socialization” across a number of industries, something that has involved a lengthy history of experimentation, research and investment.

“This didn’t happen overnight,” Amir Wain, CEO and Chairman at i2c, told PYMNTS in June. “There’s been a lot of work going on in AI, and now the product is at a stage where it can be deployed commercially across various applications.”