The company’s official corporate name will change, along with its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange, which will become TWX and aoltimewarner.com will revert to timewarner.com. The existing Time Warner Inc will be renamed Historic TW Inc.
How times change. When the two companies merged in a $146 billion deal three years ago AOL, its share price swollen by the dot-com wave, was the acquiring company.
Time Warner Inc said the change, better reflects the portfolio of our valuable businesses and ends any confusion between our corporate name and the America Online brand name.
AOL has been seen as a significant drag on the media giant, and the name change has been rumored since at least January, when the company recorded the biggest annual loss in corporate history due to AOL’s sagging fortunes.
AOL Time Warner recorded a loss for 2002 of $98.7 billion, primarily blamed on write-downs in the value of the AOL unit. At that time, the company was seeing growth across every segment of its business except AOL.
This year, the AOL unit continued to be problematic as the trend of constant subscriber growth reversed for the first time in the company’s history. How the unit had previously accounted for some advertising deals also attracted regulatory attention.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
