> Affiliate Commitments. The Company is obligated to make payments, which represent TAC, to its Affiliates. As of December 31, 2014, these commitments totaled $2,087 million, of which $505 million will be payable in 2015, $401 million will be payable in 2016, $400 million will be payable in 2017, $375 million will be payable in 2018, and $375 million will be payable in 2019, and $31 million will be payable thereafter.
as a $375mm reference but that's to all TAC; not just Mozilla. Not in research so def could have missed it.
Kara Swisher doesn't seem to provide any indication of where the information she's reporting came from. Furthermore, the link she provides at the end (as a well-done "warts-and-all" account of the deal) claims that Mozilla stands to lose money if a deal goes through...
https://techpinions.com/is-firefox-search-worth-375myear-to-...
She claims to have seen the contract in the first line of the article.
Not saying that will always work, but it did work for me (it wasn't a billion though (obviously), but a few hundred K).
Given $YHOO price hasn't moved materially this week, it seems likely that the market (including potential buyers) was aware of the Mozilla deal and priced it in.
But yes, this does look like yet another miscalculation and failure of vision.
This is a company that's essentially had multiple parts of it for sale for the better part of 4 years and this hasn't once come out.
I'm running through all the Yahoo corporate filings that Bloomberg has indexed and I can't find any link to this clause.
I mean this is a very material issue!
If you are to be a share holder in a company that's trying to broker a 3-4 Billion sale of some of its assets, then knowing that the buyer may be on the hook for an additional 1 billion bill probably means that the asset you thought you owned is probably worth 20-25% less than you originally thought.
Someone isn't going to be very happy with the yahoo leadership today:)