Yahoo busy finalizing Verizon sale

San Jose, Calif. —

In the wake of scandals threatening Yahoo’s $4.8 billion sale to Verizon and its user base, CEO Marissa Mayer on Tuesday said the company is working busily toward consummating the deal while taking “deep responsibility” for protecting users’ personal information.

“In addition to our continued efforts to strengthen our business, we are busy preparing for integration with Verizon,” Mayer, a Wausau native, said in a statement accompanying the firm’s release of quarterly revenue numbers. “We remain very confident, not only in the value of our business, but also in the value Yahoo products bring to our users’ lives. To that end, we take deep responsibility in protecting our users and the security of their information. We’re working hard to retain their trust.”

Yahoo beat Wall Street’s predicted per-share earnings for the third quarter, met revenue expectations and turned around last quarter’s big loss, according to the report Tuesday.

Revenue hit $1.3 billion, on par with the previous quarter and up slightly from the $1.2 billion in the third quarter of 2015, according to the report. Analysts had predicted $1.3 billion in revenue.

Sales, with the cost of acquiring web and mobile traffic removed, stood at $858 million, slightly below analysts’ target of $860 million.

The beleaguered Silicon Valley firm’s earnings per share, at 20 cents for the latest quarter, far surpassed Wall Street expectations of 14 cents, and the 15 cents shareholders earned from the third quarter of last year.

Mayer has emphasized the growth of what she calls MAVENS — mobile, video, native advertising and social — as crucial to Yahoo’s success. The latest quarter saw $524 million in MAVENS revenue, up $20 million from the previous quarter and $102 million more than that revenue slice from 2015’s third quarter.

For this quarterly earnings report, the struggling Sunnyvale firm scrapped the customary conference call with analysts, citing the sale process to Verizon.

Yahoo has been left reeling by recent revelations that it took nearly two years to find out hackers had stolen personal data from more than a half a billion user accounts, and that the firm had given in without a fight to a federal court order that it scan users’ incoming email in real time on behalf of the government.

Those scandals came in the midst of Yahoo’s sale to Verizon, which said last week it believed the hack had a “material” impact on Yahoo’s value, but didn’t quantify the damage. Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser on Monday issued a note predicting that the sale would go through — but for $1 billion less.

In a “financial highlights” document Yahoo released Tuesday, the firm raised the possibility that the pending sale could fall through because of risks including “the inability to obtain or delays in obtaining approval of Yahoo’s stockholders, necessary regulatory approvals … or satisfaction of other conditions to the closing of the transaction.”

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