Yahoo will part with more than 1,600 employees, or twenty percent of its staff. What is surprising is that the company does this for strategic reasons and not for financial problems.
Yahoo wants to lay off a thousand people this week already, then 600 more later this year. In all, some 8,500 employees work for the company.
This phase of layoffs follows the decision to downsize already taken by large technology firms, but the Axios news site brings the nuance, according to which it is not a question here of a restructuring in order to save the company. CEO Jim Lanzone is said to have said that Yahoo mainly wants to make strategic adjustments in an unprofitable department.
Concretely, it is a question of the ‘business unit’, where almost half of the employees have to leave. Yahoo will also give up its Supply-side Platform (SSP), which helps digital publishers automatically serve ads with their content.
For Yahoo, it is therefore rather a change of strategic course. At the same time, it is not – and far – the first time that Yahoo has gradually reduced its size to no longer be today a shadow of the internet giant that it was 25 years ago.
The company has changed ownership several times and has been in the hands of Apollo Global Management since 2021, which bought it, jointly with AOL, for $5 billion, or about half the amount paid by Verizon in 2017 (AOL and Yahoo were taken over separately for $4.4 billion and $4.5 billion, respectively).
Yahoo wants to lay off a thousand people this week already, then 600 more later this year. In all, some 8,500 employees work for the company. This phase of layoffs follows the decision to downsize already taken by large technology firms, but the news site Axios brings the nuance, according to which it is not a question here of a restructuring in order to save the company. CEO Jim Lanzone would indeed have said that Yahoo especially wants to make strategic adjustments in a non-profitable department. Concretely, it is a question of the ‘business unit’, where almost half of the employees must leave. Yahoo will thus also give up its Supply-side Platform (SSP), which helps digital publishers to automatically offer advertisements with their content. For Yahoo, it is therefore rather a change of strategic direction. At the same time, it is not – and far – the first time that Yahoo has gradually reduced its size to no longer be today a shadow of the internet giant that it was still 25 years ago. has changed ownership several times and has been in the hands of Apollo Global Management since 2021, which bought it, jointly with AOL, for 5 billion dollars, i.e. approximately half of the amount paid by Verizon in 2017 (AOL and Yahoo were taken separately for respectively 4.4 and 4.5 billion dollars).