NEW YORK: Yahoo Inc. has announced to eliminate about 1,000 jobs beginning this week, or roughly 20% of its employees, the first round of cuts in a larger plan to restructure its advertising tech division amid a wave of layoffs in the industry.
Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone said “the company is very profitable and the job cuts are due more to the division’s restructuring than troubles in the ad market.”
“These changes announced today are entirely within the context of creating a better business plan for that division going forward,” Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone said Thursday in an interview. “The company has taken many bites of the apple here in trying to make it work over the years, but as a standalone company we had to take a very honest view in how we apply our resources.”
Yahoo is “still hiring aggressively,” Lanzone said, and employees who lose their jobs will be considered for other roles at the company.
Private equity firm Apollo Global Management acquired 90% of Yahoo from Verizon in September 2021. The company had about 10,000 employees at that time, according to PitchBook data.
Axios reported that more than 1,600 workers would lose their jobs in the latest cuts, suggesting the company’s current head count is closer to 8,000 employees.
The layoffs are part of a broader effort by the company to streamline operations in Yahoo’s advertising unit. The Yahoo for Business segment’s strategy had “struggled to live up to our high standards across the entire stack,” according to a Yahoo spokesperson.
