Yahoo! Japan

Foundation: 1996

Headquarters: Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo

President and CEO: Manabu Miyasaka

Website

Executive Summary: Yahoo! Japan Corporation is a Japanese internet company originally formed as a joint venture between the US internet company Yahoo! and the Japanese firm SoftBank in 1996. Yahoo! Japan’s web portal is the most visited website in Japan, and its internet services play a key role. Yahoo! Japan went live on April 1, 1996. It became the first stock in Japanese history to trade for more than ¥100 million per share. The company was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in October 2003 and became part of the Nikkei 225 stock market index in 2005. Yahoo! Japan acquired the naming rights for the Fukuoka Dome in 2005, renaming the dome as the “Fukuoka Yahoo! Japan Dome.” Since 2010, Yahoo! Japan’s search engine has been based on Google’s search technology. In exchange, Google receives user activity data from Yahoo! Japan’s various products. In 2017, Verizon Communications purchased the core internet business of America-based Yahoo!, and merged them into Oath, Inc. Yahoo! Japan was not affected. It continued as a joint venture between Softbank and what remained of Yahoo! Inc., renamed Altaba. Yahoo! declined in global popularity in the late 2000s, but the situation hasn’t been the same for Yahoo! Japan, which continues to be strong in Japan. In July 2018, SoftBank bought US$2 billion in shares in Yahoo! Japan from Altaba, increasing its stake to over 48%. Yahoo! Japan, in turn, bought nearly the same amount of stock from SoftBank. In September 2018, Altaba sold all of its remaining shares in Yahoo! Japan for roughly US$4.3 billion. Its annual income is in the range of US$8 billion.

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