Yesterday News.com posted this e-mail from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang that gave Yahoo employees one more reason to mass e-mail their resumes to headhunters everywhere:
“today as part of our q3 earnings release, we said that our goal is to reduce our current annualized cost run rate of roughly $3.9 billion by more than $400 million before the end of 2008. we are targeting non-headcount expenses wherever possible, such as facilities and outside services. however, because compensation expenses are the single largest part of our costs, we anticipate a reduction of at least 10% of our global workforce by year-end.”
That sucks for people who work there, but I’m not surprised. Yahoo likely needs to bring some fiscal sanity to the company so that its stock value will rise over the long term. It seems to be working because their stock is up 5% as I write this. But this move may not be enough to cure what ills the company.
Time will tell though, and I for one will be watching.