Yahoo to Lay Off 2,000 Employees

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo is laying off 2,000 employees as new CEO Scott Thompson sweeps out jobs that don't fit into his plans for turning around the beleaguered Internet company.

The cuts announced Wednesday represent about 14 percent of the 14,100 workers employed by Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The company estimated it will save about $375 million annually after the layoffs are completed later this year.

Workers losing their jobs will be notified Wednesday. Some of the affected employees will stay on for an unspecified period of time to finish various projects, according to Yahoo.

The housecleaning marks Yahoo's sixth mass layoff in the past four years under three different CEOs. This one will inflict the deepest cuts yet, eclipsing a cost-cutting spree that laid off 1,500 workers in late 2008 as Yahoo tried to cope with the Great Recession.

Thompson is making his move three months after Yahoo lured him away from his previous job running eBay Inc.'s online payment service, PayPal.

The layoffs "are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require," Thompson said in a statement.

"We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities," he said. "Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal."

Yahoo shares rose 12 cents to $15.30 in morning trading.

Update: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD has additional details:

The layoffs touch all units of the company, but the hardest hit is the product division, which is headed by Blake Irving, as well as its marketing, research and international units.

But the fate of two key parts of the soon-to-be-blown-apart unit — Yahoo’s advertising technology businesses, Right Media and APT, and its search business — is still being contemplated, as I have previously reported. Possible scenarios include a sale or a joint venture transaction for both, which employ thousands of Yahoo staffers.

The layoffs tomorrow are not the end of the road in cutting costs. Along with the likely shedding of its ad tech and search businesses, Yahoo leadership is also looking at future cuts as it evaluates current businesses, which could lop even more employees off its roster. Full post