aQuantive: $6.3 billion in, $6.2 billion written off
Microsoft wrote off nearly all of the aQuantive acquisition in 2012
The market's verdict: -1.9% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
In 2007, Microsoft paid 6.3 billion dollars in cash for aQuantive, an online advertising company, to counter Google's DoubleClick purchase; it was the largest acquisition in company history at the time. On July 2, 2012, Microsoft announced a 6.2 billion dollar write-down that erased essentially the entire purchase, and the charge produced the company's first quarterly loss as a public company. The pattern would recur at larger scale with Nokia three years later, making aQuantive the pilot episode of Microsoft's big-number write-off era. The advertising strategy it was bought for had quietly died years earlier; the accounting just caught up.
This one is officially acknowledged.
They did it more than once
$6.2B written off in 2012; $7.6B in 2015. The write-downs kept pace with the ambitions.
Links
↳ caused by aQuantive goodwill write-down (July 2012)
Timeline
- Jul 2, 2012 Stood by it Microsoft stood by it.