Entertainment
Verizon set to buy Yahoo’s internet business for $4.8 bn
New York: Verizon Communications, the largest US wireless communications service provider, was set to acquire Yahoo’s ailing core internet business for about $4.8 billion with the opening of the US stock market on Monday.
The deal will allow Verizon to get Yahoo’s online assets including search, mail and instant messaging, along with its ad technology and land holdings, tech website Quartz reported.
The deal will mean an end to the struggle to survive for Yahoo, which was valued at over $125 billion at its peak in January 2000 when the dot com bubble was nearing its end.
Following the sale, the company will be left with about $41 billion it invested in the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba as well as Yahoo Japan.
Verizon makes most of its money from mobile phone connections while Yahoo generated more than twice as much revenue from search and display ads on desktop computers than it did from its so-called MAVENs businesses (Mobile, Video, Native and Social).
If we look closely, Yahoo Mail struggles while its Messenger is almost nowhere. The only known Yahoo business today is photo-sharing website Flickr and the slowly growing microblogging and social networking website Tumblr.
Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo follows its acquisition of AOL which has properties like The Huffington Post, Techcrunch and Engadget, among others.
“The Yahoo acquisition will lead Verizon to spruce up its operations post-AOL acquisition but now more into the profitable digital ad space. Verizon will surely monetize the whole operations sooner to get the best out of this deal,” Vishal Tripathi, Research Director at global market consultancy firm Gartner, told IANS.
“Verizon has got Tumblr, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and so on with this. The deal may prove to be a good one for Verizon in the long run,” he added.
Marissa Mayer, who was appointed Yahoo CEO in 2012, struggled hard to try to position Yahoo as a “mobile” company.
The acquisition provides more evidence that it sees online content and advertising as a primary way to increase growth, according to Quartz.
It is expected that by combining various tools from AOL, Yahoo, and its own operations, Verizon might be able to mount a credible challenge to Google and Facebook — its two dominant competitors.
Verizon may also leverage millions of viewers of Yahoo’s News, Sports and Finance to complement its own popular properties like TechCrunch and Huffington Post.
Earlier in June this year, executives from the micro-blogging website Twitter met Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to discuss merger possibilities.
However, according to the New York Post, Twitter appeared mainly interested in taking information out of Yahoo and it bowed out of the bidding process soon. Twitter CEO Dorsey did not show up for the Yahoo meeting.
Trying to revive it’s ailing business, Yahoo, which was found in 1994, also held talks with Facebook in March this year about an advertising partnership to allow the social networking site to sell ads on Tumblr.
International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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