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Yahoo Delays Its Sale to Verizon Until the Second Quarter

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.Credit...Jason Alden/Bloomberg

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo said on Monday that it now expected the sale of its core businesses to Verizon Communications to close no sooner than April, a delay from its earlier intention to conclude the deal in the first quarter.

The delay drags out what has been a long goodbye for Yahoo’s chief executive, Marissa Mayer, who was appointed nearly five years ago and failed to turn around the company, a long-fading web pioneer.

Yahoo’s business improved slightly in the fourth quarter despite the distractions of its pending sale to Verizon and a drumbeat of disclosures about two thefts of sensitive account data belonging to hundreds of millions of users.

Yahoo said that it saw no drop in usage after disclosures about the hacking, offering a counternarrative to Verizon’s public suggestions that the data breaches had materially reduced the value of Yahoo’s internet businesses. Verizon had agreed in July to buy those businesses for $4.8 billion, before Yahoo disclosed the hacks, which occurred in 2013 and 2014.

“With our 2016 and Q4 financial results ahead of plan, and the continued stability in our user engagement trends, the opportunities ahead with Verizon look bright,” Ms. Mayer said in a statement accompanying the quarter’s financial results.

The company said that about 90 percent of daily Yahoo users had changed their security settings or were unaffected by the breaches.

The breaches are under investigation by a host of government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the S.E.C. was questioning if Yahoo had disclosed the breaches to investors in a timely manner.

The S.E.C. and Yahoo declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal article.

A Verizon spokesman, Bob Varettoni, said the company was still evaluating the effect of the data breaches on its proposed purchase but declined to comment further.

Jeff Vogel, managing director at Bulger Partners, a technology strategy and investment banking firm based in Boston, said Verizon needed to assess the direct costs of the breaches, such as potential legal penalties and compensation to customers, as well as any long-term tarnishing of Yahoo’s brand.

“Separate and apart from what the S.E.C. does, Verizon has some tough decisions,” Mr. Vogel said. “They have to look very closely at the brand damage and expected deterioration in the parts of business affected by the breach.”

Despite all of the controversy, Yahoo’s business is now starting to perk up. Revenue in the fourth quarter was $1.47 billion, up 15 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $162 million, compared with a loss of $4.4 billion in the previous year.

The company’s preferred benchmark — adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — also improved, rising 51 percent, to $324 million.

Yahoo noted that it had cut costs significantly over the past year, eliminating more than 2,100 jobs.

For investors, the fate of Yahoo’s core business has long been an afterthought, overshadowed by the company’s 15 percent investment stake in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, and its 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, a separate company controlled by SoftBank.

Those stakes are worth a total of about $46 billion at current market prices. After the Verizon transaction, the shares will be owned by the remaining stub of Yahoo, which will be renamed Altaba.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: As It Copes With Fallout From Hacks, Yahoo Says Sale to Verizon Will Be Delayed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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