New Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson isn’t wasting any time with restructuring the company — it’s reportedly on the verge of laying off thousands of employees, AllThingsD is reporting.
Thompson hired an outside firm, Boston Consulting Company, to help the company focus on projects with large growth potential. The other side of that coin is getting rid of areas that are stagnating, and a large portion of the layoffs are going to come from Yahoo’s products division, the report says. Also said to be on the chopping block: parts of public relations, marketing, research and regional projects.
Yahoo has 14,100 employees, according to its last earnings report. It also has a wide array of products and services, from Yahoo News and photo-sharing site Flickr to small pieces of software such as FoxyTunes. Although Yahoo began to pare down its sprawling portfolio of products under previous CEO Carol Bartz, Thompson appears to be planning to go much further than she ever did.
Thompson’s first significant move as CEO was to threaten to sue Facebook over its intellectual property. It did so in a very public way, informing The New York Times at virtually the same time it gave Facebook notice. The move was controversially aggressive, with many seeing it as a desperate move by a company whose relevancy is waning by the day.
Thompson is also having a hard time striking a deal that would see Yahoo sell off most of its Asian assets. Investors have put pressure on the company to exit or reduce its involvement in Asia, but talks between the company and China’s Alibaba Group and Japan’s SoftBank are said to have stalled.
What do you think of Thompson’s reported plans to chop off big parts of the company? Will it work, or is Yahoo on course for irrelevancy no matter what?
Source: Mashable
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