Report: Yahoo plans cost-cutting moves, layoffs

Yahoo is expected to announce cost-cutting moves this week, including another round of layoffs, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

The exact number of layoffs is unknown, but job cuts are expected to come from all departments in the 14,300-employee company, according to the report. Yahoo, which is set to announce its third-quarter earnings Tuesday, has reportedly asked managers to identify areas where the company can achieve operating budget reductions of 15 percent. In January, Yahoo laid off an estimated 1,100 employees in a bid to cut costs and trim operations that weren't performing as well as others.

Rumors of layoffs at Yahoo have been circulating for weeks, with Alley Insider's Henry Blodget calling for the elimination of 3,000 jobs at the company.

At the same time, Yahoo's stock has been under tremendous pressure, closing at $12.90 on Friday. Just a week before that, its stock traded as low as $11.37, the lowest price since March 2003. Yahoo, as a result, now has a market cap of $17.88 billion.

Although Yahoo's shares continue to give up ground, the company's stock performance during recent trading sessions has largely mirrored the broader markets. Likewise, many tech companies are resorting to layoffs to stem their financial losses.

What's different for Yahoo is that five months ago Microsoft walked away from its buyout offer of $47.5 billion to snap up the entire company.

CNET News reporter Dawn Kawamoto noted that painful reality last week:

No doubt, most tech companies are getting pummeled on Wall Street, but Yahoo's drop has to be particularly galling, given how much more Microsoft was willing to pay for the company.

Yahoo's stock price got a goose on Thursday after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer noted Yahoo's declining stock price in saying that a takeover of the Internet search pioneer still made sense, putting even more pressure on Yahoo executives.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

The dopes should have sold out to Microsoft

[MMC Racing]

Welcome to a slow death.

[Kwasiowusu]

Jerry Yang is such a dope.
So now what happened to his infamous poison pill, in which he put in place, the most nasty , rabid conditions ever seen, for anyone who was foolish enough to take over Yahoo, whereby the best brains in Yahoo could walk out the door at once, and still had had to be paid these massive amounts by whoever took over Yahoo?
Talk about utter hubris.
Total arrogance and stupidity.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad
Too bad they don?t put CEO's in jail for deliberately and maliciously wiping out shareholder wealth to satisfy their own gargantuan ego..
Jerry Yang would be # 1 on that list.

[upuaut]

Microsoft must be salivating for Yahoo now. It's keep looking better and better.

[bobby_brady]

Didn't Jerry Yang say that Yahoo was worth much more than $33/share?? LMAO!!! Yahoo isn't worth $5 a share! They simply use Googles search engine, so what's the point of Yahoo even existing ? Yahoo should just dry up and blow away.

[tshawkins]

Yahoo DOES NOT use the google search engine, they have been using their own technology since late 2003/early 2004. I was involved in the migration process away from google to the internal systems.