- GeneralM&A
- July 5, 2021
- 4 minutes read
Deal: SoftBank Pays $1.6B For Yahoo Trademark In Japan
You may know Yahoo as one of the old, fading incumbents of the early dot-com days, but here’s the thing,…
You may know Yahoo as one of the old, fading incumbents of the early dot-com days, but here’s the thing, that name is actually still quite popular. It’s even more popular in Japan, where the Yahoo Japan name is still a big one with popular internet services in the country.
- Yahoo Japan is a joint venture of Yahoo the company and SoftBank, the biggest tech conglomerate in Japan. The venture began in 1996 with SoftBank coughing out big money to license the Yahoo name in Japan.
- If you’ve been following the news recently, you probably know that Yahoo is getting sold to a major private equity firm named Apollo. The company’s owner, Verizon Communications, is selling Yahoo together with AOL, another old dot-com tale, for $5bn after buying both companies for $9bn.
- Now, it appears that Verizon is not done sucking value from Yahoo with its sale to Apollo. Z Holdings, a division of SoftBank, has struck a deal to pay a one-time sum equivalent to $1.6bn to buy the trademark to the Yahoo name in Japan. It’s in contrast to the previous agreement under which SoftBank made regular royalty payments for the rights to the name.
- A $1.6bn price tag for the Yahoo trademark implies that despite having fallen far from its peak, the name is still worth something in gold. To SoftBank, it’s an important name that’s inseparable from its internet businesses in Japan.
- Z Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary, was formed from a merger between the original Yahoo Japan and a competing company, Line Corporation, this year. Now combined, it’ll be retaining the Yahoo name for a big payment to Verizon, a telecom company that’ll find the cash very useful in boosting its investments in future technologies such as 5G.
- With the new agreement where SoftBank is paying a one-time fee to own the Yahoo Japan trademark, there’s now more freedom to its use of the brand name in its internet businesses, the company said.
