AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong is making it clear that his company isn’t planning to go private anytime soon. Last fall, AOL was considering a deal with several private equity firms that would combine the company with Yahoo. But during the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York, Armstrong said the company would remain independent. “We are not focused on a private equity deal now," he said. "We are focused on a turnaround and we're pretty excited about the business overall.”
In order to facilitate this turnaround, Armstrong said, “We would opportunistically add more assets to the platforms that we thought would be really successful.” AOL has recently been on a buying spree, acquiring the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, and investing heavily in news site Patch. The company also plans to roll out a professional division for government, defense, and energy execs.
“I hope you don't think we have done any ‘Hail Marys,’” Armstrong added. “Arianna's company is the best social distributor of content, has some of the most addictive and obsessive content on the Internet . . . If we look at our vision of being highest quality, highest scale digital media player, and brand advertising player, we have many of the components from a structural standpoint.”
