Yahoo is shutting down its operation in Beijing China. Around 300 employees will be losing their jobs. This move is part of cost-cutting measures by the said company to reduce expenditures.
The Yahoo Company said it informed employees of the job cuts on Wednesday. The Beijing office, Yahoo’s only physical presence in mainland China, was mostly made up of engineers and functioned as a research and development centre. “We will be consolidating certain functions into fewer offices, including our headquarters in Sunnyvale, California,” Yahoo said.
The lay-offs are the latest in a series of cost-cutting measures by chief executive Marissa Mayer. Including the latest round, Yahoo has cut 700-900 employees since October, mostly in offices outside the US.
The CEO is under pressure to rein in expenditures after activist investor Starboard Value last year urged her to reduce costs by as much as $US500 million ($645m).
The lay-offs in China represent about 2 per cent of Yahoo’s global staff of 12,500. Job cuts in recent months have affected workers in Bangalore, India, and the company’s Canadian offices.
Yahoo has a fractious history in China, a country where US tech companies have struggled with government censorship and competition from local rivals. In 2007, Yahoo settled a lawsuit with the families of two Chinese dissidents who were jailed after the internet giant provided information to authorities about their online activities.
Ms Mayer was an executive at Google in 2010 when the search giant withdrew from China after a confrontation with local authorities over censorship.
Yahoo’s decision to close its Beijing office wasn’t influenced by issues related to censorship or pressure from the Chinese government, a source said.
Yahoo stopped offering services to users in China in 2013. That year, it told email users to transfer their accounts to Alimail, an email service offered by Yahoo’s close partner in the region, Alibaba.
The Chinese address for its home page, Yahoo.cn, redirects visitors to its Singapore site.
