Verizon confirmed Wednesday that Tim Armstrong will step down as Oath’s CEO at the end of 2018.

Armstrong, 47, whose contract with Verizon is up early next year, joined the telecom giant in 2015 when it bought AOL Inc., where he was chief executive officer. The company later bought Yahoo and set out to transform its online operations into a digital-advertising behemoth that could compete with Google and Facebook Inc. But Verizon hasn’t made much of a dent in those two Silicon Valley giants, and the strategy has shifted recently.

Verizon had planned to spin off Oath, the unit that includes AOL and Yahoo, into a separate company and had even drawn interest from private equity buyers, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Armstrong had spent the past six months hiring an executive team with that plan in mind.

But this summer, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam stepped down sooner than expected and executives decided instead to more closely integrate Oath with its parent company. Verizon’s new CEO, Hans Vestberg, who previously ran Ericsson AB, took over last month.

The discussions were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal.