AOL Will Lay Off Close to 500 Employees
November 17 2016 - 3:08PM
Dow Jones News
By Mike Shields
Verizon Communications Inc.'s AOL on Thursday plans to lay off
close to 500 employees, said a person familiar with the matter.
Among the areas hit by AOL's staff reduction will be human
resources, marketing, communications and finance, the person
said.
A spokeswoman confirmed the dismissals, saying AOL is reducing
"a small percentage of our global workforce."
In a memo to employees, AOL Chief Executive Tim Armstrong noted
that between multiple acquisitions in the past year, the company
had added over 1,500 new people, resulting in some redundancy.
"As we have settled into those changes, there are a number of
areas that require consolidation to improve operations and limit
the amount of hand-offs in our business processes," he wrote.
News of AOL's layoffs were first reported by Recode.
Verizon acquired AOL in 2015 for $4.4 billion. The wireless
giant has said that deal was driven partly by a desire to take on
Facebook and Google, the two dominant players in the online
advertising business.
To that end, Verizon announced an agreement to acquire Yahoo
earlier this year for $4.83 billion. That deal--expected to close
next year-- has been complicated by revelations of a massive Yahoo
data breach.
Verizon's General Counsel Craig Silliman said it was
"reasonable" to believe that Yahoo's breach represented a material
event that could allow it to change the terms of the takeover, the
Wall Street Journal reported last month. However, Marni Walden,
Verizon's executive vice president and president of product
innovation and new businesses, said last month at the WSJD
conference that Verizon hopes to go ahead with the deal.
Write to Mike Shields at mike.shields@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 17, 2016 14:53 ET (19:53 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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