Verizon Acquires AOL For $4.4B

Verizon has quickly acquired AOL which is the owner of TechCrunch. The company will focus on the future growth of its business.

Verizon acquired AOL and it was quite fast the announcement regarding the completion of acquisition. AOL is the owner of TechCrunch and the tech company has purchased all the outstanding shares for $4.4 billion, $50 per share. The sale had originally been announced only a month ago.

Latest Verizon news suggests that at the time when it had originally announced that it was going to buy AOL, Tim Armstrong shall be continuing to lead the operations at AOL. However, now we have got to know the insights as to how the whole operation will be merged with that of Verizon’s. The Digital Media Services president for Verizon, Bob Toohey, is going to report Armstrong. DMS is the advertising business of the tech company. In turn to this, Armstrong is going to report to Walden who is the EVP and president of new businesses and product innovation.

A lot of rumours have been passed as to whether the company would be choosing to keep the content holdings that are extensive pertaining to AOL along with the internet subscription and the advertising business of it, two areas that consist of a lot of visible synergies with the existing operations of the company.

Verizon news reports that the sites such as Huffington Post has featured rather strongly as the sites that are being rumoured for sale. However till now there are no plans or indications regarding it being offloaded or anything of that sort. Even then we shall report as soon as this changes or anything else happens to it.

It is interesting that the company seems to be changing and chopping other business parts at the time when it has decided to refocus where it invests the resources in order to focus on the future growth for the business. It had also been announced that the tech company has sold the SSL certificates business named CyberTrust to another firm, DigiCert and the sum had not been disclosed for this venture. Verizon will be selling the certificates as the reseller to DigiCert to the enterprises.

The announcement regarding the deal had been a short one by the company. There will be more details provided by the company in a conference call. The AOL employees will be getting the Verizon tablets as the welcoming gesture by the company. It seems that the tech company is all set to approach AOL and utilize it for the future growth of its own business and be competitors to other telecom and tech giants which are on the same path of monetization and globalization.