Yahoo Planning Job Cuts?

Yahoo is apparently planning job cuts to make its bottom line more appealing to investors and stockholders...but will the number be in the hundreds, or thousands?

Internet giant Yahoo currently has about 14,000 employees, but reports are now circulating the company is planning a swathe of layoffs to bolster the company’s bottom line and keep shareholders and investors happy. Although the blog Silicon Alley Insider describes the planning layoffs as “mass firings” and forecasts a headcount reduction of “at least a thousand people” and perhaps twice that number, a Yahoo spokesperson has told Reuters the layoffs would likely be “in the hundreds.”

That’s if they happen at all: Yahoo’s goal is apparently to keep roughly the same headcount for 2008 as it had for 2007, which the company could achieve through controlled hiring just to handle employee attrition. The company may reveal its plans when it reports its year-end financials on January 29, but it’s also possible Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang will scrap the whole layoff idea and press forward into 2008 with current staffing levels.

Yahoo appointed founder Jerry Yang as CEO in June 2007. Yahoo added a little over 2,500 employees during 2007. Yahoo has been restructuring itself in efforts to streamline its operations and compete with Google and Microsoft for a share of the lucrative Internet advertising market, as well as high profile services like Internet search, user applications like mail and instant messaging, and data-sharing services like Flickr. However, industry analysts have called for Yahoo to take more drastic measures to return the company to previous levels of growth, and some have even suggested Yahoo’s best course of action would be to be acquired by a deep-pocketed company…like Microsoft.