Yahoo is going to lay off more than 1,600 people, 20 percent of its workforce. Remarkably, it does so for strategic reasons, not financial problems.
Yahoo plans to lay off 1,000 people this week and another 600 later this year. In total, approximately 8,500 people work for the company.
The round of layoffs is coming now that several large technology companies are putting people on the street. However, news site Axios nuances that it is not about restructuring to save things. Instead, CEO Jim Lanzone would have said that the company mainly wants to make strategic adjustments in a division that is not profitable.
In concrete terms, this is a Business advertising unit where about half of the people have to leave. Similarly, Yahoo is discontinuing its Supply-side Platform (SSP), which helps digital publishers automatically serve ads with their content.
For Yahoo, it is more about a strategic change, of course. But, at the same time, it is by no means the first time that Yahoo is shrinking little by little and is hardly the internet giant of 25 years ago.
The company changed hands several times and has been owned by Apollo Global Management since 2021. It bought the company, along with AOL, for $5 billion, about half what Verizon paid for it in 2017 (AOL and Yahoo were sold separately for 4 billion dollars). .4 billion and $4.5 billion.)
