Yahoo could be set to begin laying off thousands of employees as early as this week, as the Internet giant’s new chief executive finalises a major new strategy for the internet firm.
The Sunday Times reported that the move could see the groups search division come under threat, as CEO Scott Thompson recently talked with Microsoft and Google about potentially using their search engines on the Yahoo! site.
The revival of plans to sell-off Yahoo!’s Asian assets is another possibility.
The company’s fortunes have plunged since Google and Facebook have shaken up the business of the internet.
Yahoo poached Thompson from the payment firm PayPal in January, having fired the previous chief executive, Carol Bartz, after she failed to find a way out of the company’s strategic malaise.
Lay-offs amongst the 14,000 staff are expected across the board, but reports over the weekend suggested that the marketing and product development groups could be hardest hit. Thompson is believed to have decided to focus Yahoo on its existing online media and advertising businesses.
In January, announcing his first set of financial results, Mr Thompson said Yahoo had to make the most of the data it had on more than 700 million users around the world. “Those of you who know me understand I want to hear all the options,” he said on a conference call with analysts.
“But when it comes to making decisions, I make them quickly and push to move fast, fast, fast.”
Yahoo remains one of the largest search-engines, email and messenger services and, through Flickr, photo-sharing sites in the world, and it runs a networks of websites spanning news, sport, finance, horoscopes and much more.
The firm has been caught out in the switch to social media, failing to capitalise on the Messenger, Flicker and Delicious products.
The rise of Google in mobile clearly caught the more established portal off guard and in spite of their rich patents in mobile and location based services, the under investment in engineering means they were quickly over taken
Yahoo US and Yahoo Japan still enjoy high general awareness as an internet mega-brand, but in most markets yahoo has lost the battle against Facebook and Google.
