Yahoo is adding a new director and parting ways with two other board members in the latest shakeup of the Internet company’s hierarchy.
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin joins Yahoo’s board, while Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Weather Channel CEO David Kenny step down.
The changes announced on Thursday pare Yahoo’s board to 11 directors. All but one of them, former accounting executive Sue James, have joined Yahoo’s board this year.
The overhaul is part of an effort to bring in new ideas as Yahoo tries to revive revenue growth and snap itself out of a malaise that has left its stock price well below where it stood five years ago.
Yahoo hired former Google executive Marissa Mayer five months ago to orchestrate the turnaround effort. She joined Yahoo’s board when she was named the company’s chief executive in July.
NEW DIRECTOR
Levchin, 37, is the first new director to be named since Mayer’s arrival.
After getting rich from PayPal’s US$1.5 billion sale to eBay a decade ago, Levchin started a photo-sharing service called Slide. He added to his wealth by selling Slide to Google for US$179 million two years ago.
Levchin stayed at Google briefly before leaving the Internet search leader to start a data-mining company called HVF.
“Max is someone I’ve admired throughout my career for his phenomenal sense for great products and keen focus on user experiences,” Mayer, also 37, said in a statement.
Levchin is the fourth director recruited by Daniel Loeb, who manages a hedge fund that ranks among Yahoo’s largest shareholders.
Loeb uncovered a misstatement on the official biography of Yahoo’s then-CEO, Scott Thompson, that led to Thompson’s departure earlier this year after just four months on the job.
After Thompson rejected Loeb’s attempts to gain a seat on Yahoo’s board, the company relented and agreed to allow him to nominate up to four people. Besides himself, Loeb picked turnaround specialist Harry Wilson and former MTV executive Michael Wolf before adding Levchin to the list.
REFOCUSING
Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, said Smith and Kenny are stepping down to focus on running their own companies.
Smith joined Yahoo’s board in 2010 and Kenney followed last year. Both men participated in the complicated negotiations that culminated three months ago in Yahoo selling half its stake in rapidly growing Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group Holdings (阿里巴巴), generating a windfall of US$7.6 billion, before taxes.
Kenny was also once considered a candidate to be Yahoo’s CEO after the company fired Carol Bartz as its leader in September last year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day