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 The parent company of the British newspaper, the Daily Mail &
General Trust, said on Monday that it was in early stage discussions
with several parties about a possible bid for Yahoo, confirming a
Wall Street Journal report it had approached private equity buyers
to team up.
"We have been in discussions with a number of parties who are
potential bidders," a spokeswoman for DailyMail.com said in an
emailed statement, declining to name the private equity firms or
give any financial details.
DailyMail.com and MailOnline are the celebrity-focused news websites
of the right-leaning London-based Daily Mail newspaper. Globally the
websites attract 14 million visitors a day, putting them among the
world's most popular English language news sites.
Buying Yahoo's assets - which range from search and email to news,
sports, photos and other properties - would expand DailyMail.com's
reach and improve its digital ad revenues, which for its 2015
financial year came in at 73 million pounds ($104 million), a tenth
of the company's overall annual turnover.
Liberum analyst Ian Whittaker said a deal with Yahoo would be
positive for the company, helping it sell more U.S. advertising and
reducing its dependence on shrinking advertising sales from its
newspaper business in Britain.
"The U.S. has been the main driver of digital growth for Daily Mail
& General Trust, whilst traffic has grown well they haven't quite
monetized this traffic as successfully as they would have liked,"
Whittaker said.
That would follow a similar but smaller deal last year when it
bought Elite Daily, a U.S. news and entertainment website in a deal
which it said would make its offering to U.S.-based advertising
buyers more attractive by widening its audience.
Daily Mail & General Trust PLC's potential bid could take one of two
forms, according to the WSJ report, citing people familiar with the
matter. In one scenario, a private-equity partner would acquire
Yahoo’s core web business, with the Mail taking over the news and
media properties.
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In the other scenario, the private-equity firm would acquire Yahoo’s
core web business and merge its media and news properties with the
Mail’s online operations. The merged units would form a new company
that would be run by the Mail and give a larger equity stake to the
Mail’s parent company than under the first scenario, the report
said.
Bids for Yahoo are due on April 18, in an auction which is likely to
be hotly-contested.
Time Inc is also considering partnering with a private equity firm
on a bid for Yahoo's core Internet assets, Reuters reported earlier
this month while U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon <VZ.N>, which
owns AOL, another fallen Internet pioneer, is also eyeing a deal.
Blackstone Group LP, KKR & Co LP, TPG Capital LP, Apax Partners LLP,
Warburg Pincus LLC, Bain Capital LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC, are
some of the financial parties weighing bids for Yahoo's internet
assets, sources have told Reuters.
(Reporting by Sarah Young, Additional reporting by Jessica Toonkel,
Eric Auchard; Editing by Peter Cooney and Giles Elgood)
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