After announcing a sharp drop in fourth-quarter profits on Tuesday, Yahoo issued a disappointing outlook for this year, suggesting that investors would have to wait until next year for a turnaround.
Yahoo also said that as part of its plan to revive its fortunes, it would cut 1,000 jobs by the middle of next month to reduce costs and narrow its focus to its most important businesses.
The company, however, said it planned to invest aggressively in some areas, like advertising technology and selected portions of its Internet portal, as it tries to capture a larger share of online ad dollars. Since the company said laid-off employees could apply for new jobs, the net effect on the company's work force, which recently grew to 14,300, was not clear.
Chief executive Jerry Yang (
Yahoo executives said those projections were largely independent of the slowdown in the US economy, noting that it was too early to predict whether weak financial, travel and housing sectors would hurt online advertising.
In a sign of growing impatience, investors reacted negatively to the announcements, which were made after the markets closed. In after-hours trading, Yahoo shares fell more than 10 percent, to levels not seen in more than three years.
Yahoo said its fourth-quarter net income fell to US$206 million, or US$0.15 a share, down 23 percent year-on-year. Revenues grew 8 percent to US$1.8 billion.
Yang has promised to focus on three objectives: becoming a starting point for the most consumers on the Web; making the company a top choice for marketers seeking to place ads on sites across the Web; and opening Yahoo's technology infrastructure to third-party programmers and publishers.
Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛) has died of pneumonia at the age of 48 while on a trip to Japan, where she contracted influenza during the Lunar New Year holiday, her sister confirmed today through an agent. "Our whole family came to Japan for a trip, and my dearest and most kindhearted sister Barbie Hsu died of influenza-induced pneumonia and unfortunately left us," Hsu's sister and talk show hostess Dee Hsu (徐熙娣) said. "I was grateful to be her sister in this life and that we got to care for and spend time with each other. I will always be grateful to
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Suspected Chinese spies posing as Taiwanese tourists have been arrested for allegedly taking photographs of Philippine Coast Guard ships, local media reported. The suspected spies stayed at a resort in Palawan, where from a secluded location they used their phones to record coast guard ships entering and leaving a base, Philippine TV network GMA said on Wednesday. Palawan is near the Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) and other disputed areas of the South China Sea, where tensions have been on the rise between China and the Philippines. The suspects allegedly also used drones without permission and installed cameras on coconut trees in the