Yahoo cuts 2,000 jobs as revenues fall

Yahoo said Wednesday that it will lay off 2,000 people, or 14 percent of its workforce, as part of a restructuring meant to revive the struggling Internet giant.

"Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo - smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require," said Scott Thompson, CEO of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, in a statement.

The company did not specify which areas of its business would be affected, though the Wall Street Journal reported that the marketing division and group responsible for new Yahoo products would see significant losses. Yahoo said executives would share their plans later this month, when the company releases its first-quarter financial results.

The move will save Yahoo about $375 million a year, the company said, minus a one-time pretax charge of up to $145 million in severance payments. More cuts could be coming: The Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, said further layoffs are expected.

Yahoo has about 14,100 employees, and has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years. As the recession worsened in 2008, the company laid off 1,500 workers. At the end of 2010, under then-CEO Carol Bartz, the company laid off another 600.

But earlier cost-cutting moves, along with divestitures in the company's business lines and a controversial deal to let Microsoft power Yahoo's search engine, have done little to improve profits for the Web pioneer.

Yahoo has posted revenue declines for 12 consecutive quarters, a key reason that the company's board replaced Bartz in September after 2½ years at the helm. The company has continued to explore selling off its valuable minority stakes in Asian Internet companies, which account for most of its roughly $20 billion market value.

Yahoo's e-mail, news, sports and finance sites are among the most popular on the Web, serving more than 500 million people a month. But its core advertising business is struggling to compete with ad platforms developed by Google and Facebook.

The company's share of online advertising declined to 13.1 percent last year, from 14.4 percent in 2010, according to research firm eMarketer.