Boo hoo for Yahoo! workers
YAHOO! Inc’s China unit will cut workers after the Internet search site failed to narrow the gap with the country’s market leader, Baidu.com Inc.
The Yahoo! unit will dismiss “fewer than 100” employees, Porter Erisman, a spokesman for Alibaba.com Corp, which operates the search site in China, said yesterday.
Yahoo! has lost share in China’s Internet market, the world’s second biggest, as Baidu and Google Inc introduced services including online map searches and spreadsheets.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo!, which has reported seven straight quarters of declining profit, said in a statement on January 21 that it will “eliminate some areas of the business.”
Baidu’s market share in China rose to 60 percent in the fourth quarter from 58 percent a year earlier, while Google’s climbed to 26 percent from 17 percent, according to researcher Analysys International.
Yahoo’s share fell to 9.6 percent from 13 percent, Analysys said.