By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo’s turnaround attempt is going to be messy.
In his first three months on the job, CEO Scott Thompson has imposed the largest layoffs in the company’s 17-year history, reshaped the board of directors, picked a potentially disruptive fight with a major shareholder and sued Facebook for patent infringement.
He says there’s even more upheaval to come.
Thompson delivered a painful jolt Wednesday with a payroll purge of about 2,000 workers, or about 14 percent of Yahoo’s 14,100 employees. The cuts will save about $375 million annually as Yahoo tries to boost its earnings and long-slumping stock price.
More shakeups loom as Thompson reshuffles divisions and considers selling an online ad-placement service and other operations that don’t fit into his strategy.
Those potential changes will follow a tumultuous time for Thompson, an affable and well-respected executive who held the top job at eBay Inc.’s thriving PayPal service before being lured away to help salvage Yahoo.
Thompson “definitely seems to be taking a very broad and bold view of what needs to be done at Yahoo,” said Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ analyst Scott Kessler. “He seems to know it isn’t going to be easy and it isn’t going to be pleasant.”
The specifics of Thompson’s vision are still unclear. In comments to analysts and reporters, he has talked generally about doing a better job of analyzing the data that Yahoo collects about its 700 million monthly visitors. That would help the company sell ads and develop mobile services to connect with the growing number of people surfing the Web on smartphones and tablet computers.
Once an Internet trendsetter, Yahoo has been outmaneuvered and outsmarted by Google and Facebook in the race for online advertising. Although Yahoo’s website remains a popular destination, people have been spending less time there and dwelling longer on Google services and on Facebook.
That shift has made Yahoo less attractive to advertisers, a problem that has been compounded by the company’s inability to target marketing messages at the right audience as precisely as Google and Facebook.
After announcing the layoffs Wednesday, Thompson promised to share more details about his plans April 17, when Yahoo Inc. is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings.
“We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities,” Thompson said Wednesday in a statement. “Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first. And we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.”
Investors haven’t been buying into Thompson’s vision so far, partly because his predecessors have made and broken similar promises. Thompson is Yahoo’s fourth full-time CEO in less than five years — a period marked by steady declines in revenue, even though more advertising has been shifting to the Internet.
Yahoo shares gained 9 cents Wednesday to close at $15.27.
The stock price has dropped by 6 percent since Yahoo announced Thompson’s hiring in early January.
The downturn leaves Yahoo more vulnerable to takeover offers from potential suitors who might prize Yahoo’s brand and its popular news, finance and entertainment services. Yahoo shares have not traded above $20 in more than 3 years.
As traumatic as the job cuts may be for laid-off workers, Kessler says Yahoo needed to prune its payroll to show Wall Street that the company can be run more efficiently than it has been in recent years.
Last year, Yahoo produced revenue of $353,000 per employee while its two biggest rivals, Internet search leader Google Inc. and social networking leader Facebook Inc., each generated $1.2 million per employee.