Yahoo pulls plug on China operations

Yahoo is laying off between 200 and 300 employees and shutting down its Beijing research centre, according to a person familiar with the matter.    Dow Jones/BeijingYahoo Inc is withdrawing its remaining operations in China, laying off between 200 and 300 employees and shutting down its Beijing research centre, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company said it informed employees of the job cuts on Wednesday. The Beijing office, Yahoo’s only physical presence in mainland China, was mostly made up of engineers and functioned as a research and development centre. “We will be consolidating certain functions into fewer offices, including to our headquarters in Sunnyvale, California,” Yahoo said. The layoffs are the latest in a series of cost-cutting measures by chief executive Marissa Mayer. Including the latest round, Yahoo has cut 700 to 900 employees since October, mostly in offices outside the US. The CEO is under pressure to rein in expenditures after activist investor Starboard Value LP last year urged her to reduce costs by as much as $500mn. The layoffs in China represent about 2% of Yahoo’s global staff of 12,500. Job cuts in recent months have affected workers in Bangalore, India, and the company’s Canadian offices. Yahoo has a fractious history in China, a country where US tech companies have struggled with government censorship and competition from local rivals. In 2007, Yahoo settled a lawsuit with the families of two Chinese dissidents who were jailed after the Internet giant provided information to authorities about their online activities. Mayer was an executive at Google Inc in 2010 when the search giant withdrew from China after a confrontation with local authorities over censorship. Yahoo’s decision to close its Beijing office wasn’t influenced by issues related to censorship or pressure from the Chinese government, the person familiar with the matter said. Yahoo stopped offering services to users in China in 2013. That year, it told e-mail users to transfer their accounts to Alimail, an e-mail service offered by Yahoo’s close partner in the region, Alibaba Holding Group.