The personal fairness agency has been on a shopping for spree previously few months, saying offers to amass the crafts retailer Michaels and the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. It has additionally had a shake-up in its senior ranks, with its co-founder, Leon Black, saying in late March that he was stepping down as chairman after the revelation he had paid greater than $150 million to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Apollo declined to remark. Verizon didn’t reply to requests for remark. Bloomberg, which first reported the anticipated deal, mentioned Verizon would keep a stake within the media arm.
The deal would sign the unraveling of a method Verizon heralded in 2015 when it acquired the pale web large AOL for $4.4 billion. The acquisition was meant to provide Verizon a pathway into cell, with the objective of utilizing AOL’s promoting know-how to promote advertisements in opposition to digital content material. Verizon doubled down on that technique in 2017 with its $4.48 billion acquisition of Yahoo, which it mixed with AOL underneath the umbrella Oath.
However Google and Fb have proved to be formidable rivals within the digital promoting market. Verizon acknowledged their may in 2018 when it wrote down the worth of Oath by $4.6 billion, attributing the transfer partially to “elevated aggressive and market pressures” that had resulted in “lower-than-expected revenues and earnings.”
Underneath its chief govt, Hans Vestberg, the corporate has as an alternative emphasised bettering the know-how round its cell enterprise. In March, it agreed to pay almost $53 billion to license wi-fi airwaves that may assist the corporate increase its next-generation 5G infrastructure. It additionally plans to spend $10 billion over the following few years to wire extra cell towers and improve its programs. The corporate’s complete debt now exceeds $180 billion.
The media enterprise was initially meant to distinguish Verizon from its rivals by giving it distinctive content material choices, however it didn’t work out that approach. The cellphone provider as an alternative reached an settlement in 2019 with Disney to supply its new streaming service Disney+ free to its prospects. (AT&T, against this, spent $85 billion to purchase Time Warner in 2018 to create its personal streaming platform, HBO Max.)
In 2018, Verizon introduced the departure of Mr. Armstrong. The group was restructured and in January 2019, it laid off about 800 staff, or about 7 % of the employees.
Final yr, Verizon started to dismantle the media group with the sale of HuffPost to BuzzFeed.