Word: aol
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Brace yourself. A nonprofit group loosely affiliated with Netscape is about to release a new browser called Mozilla. It's fast, it's flexible, and it has the backing of AOL (which owns Netscape, not to mention TIME) and its 35 million users. Life is about to get complicated...
Sticking out of AOL Time Warner's rather humdrum earnings report Wednesday was a very gaudy number: A one-time loss of $54 billion. It's the largest spill of red ink, dollar for dollar, in U.S. corporate history and nearly two-thirds of the company's current stock-market value. (It's also, as a lot of news outlets have noted, more than the annual GDP of Ecuador, but that's hardly relevant here.) All for something called "goodwill impairment...
...this year the rules have changed. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (yes, there actually standards in accounting) has decreed this year that companies must test their goodwill assets for "impairment" annually - and when they find some, they've got to fess up. And while AOL Time Warner's number may be the biggest (just topping JDS Uniphase's write-down last year of just over $50 billion), the media giant (and corporate overlord of this writer) isn't standing alone. A recent Bear Stearns study anticipates that some 500 companies are candidates for write-downs this year, with perhaps...
...many? Call it a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover. When AOL and Time Warner first decided to merge, the dot-com love affair was raging and the stock of the combined companies was worth $290 billion, mostly thanks to the price of AOL. By the time the stock-swap deal closed a year later, the bubble had burst, AOL was back on earth, and even though AOL had technically been the acquirer (thanks to that high stock price), the new AOL Time Warner suddenly had a relative lemon on its hands...
...Investors generally ignore the bad news, either because they'd seen it coming - AOL Time Warner telegraphed its loss weeks ago - and because nearly every survivor of the tech bust has a few embarrassing purchases to own up to. Besides, AOL Time Warner's shares are down 41 percent this year alone, thanks to investors doing their own writing-down of AOL's value (with most analysts pegging it at about $1 a share on top of Time Warner's assets). So the $54 billion loss - and the total $1 trillion in goodwill-impairment writedowns that some analysts expect...