Yahoo! reached a deal to sell a 48.6-acre corporate site in California to the Chinese technology firm LeEco, according to the reports by Silicon Valley Business Journal and Investor’s Business Daily.
The site is located in Santa Clara, near the heart of Silicon Valley and four miles away from the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters.
Yahoo paid $106 million for the land back in 2006. The land had entitlements to build roughly 3 million square feet of office or research and development space with a potential to accommodate more than 12,000 workers. But the company never had the chance to begin construction.
The site is near the Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers football team. Since the company’s revenue has dropped steadily from a peak in 2008, it struck a deal with the football team to use the area as an off-site parking lot, according to the Business Journal.
Yahoo! has struggled to build online and mobile advertisement revenue and lags behind its rivals Google and Facebook. The Company’s board recently hired three investment banks to evaluate potential bids for its Internet operations in February.
As part of its restructuring efforts, Yahoo! also said it began to explore selling nonstrategic assets, such as patents, real estate, and other noncore assets. Through these efforts, the company hopes to generate between $1 billion and $3 billion in cash, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Headquartered in Beijing, LeEco is a Chinese technology company and one of the largest online video companies in China.
Founded in November 2004 by Jia Yueting, LeEco offers a range of products including smartphones, televisions, mountain bikes, and more recently, electric cars.
Jia Yueting, CEO of LeEco, is also a key investor in Los Angeles-based company Faraday Future an electric car startup, which intends to compete with Tesla Motors. The company is also spending $1 billion to build a production facility in Nevada, which will be a 3 million square foot, 900-acre development.
