Yahoo replacing co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO

Internet firm Yahoo which has announced that Jerry Yang is stepping down as chief executive
©AFP/File – Don Emmert

 

Internet firm Yahoo is set to replace co-founder Jerry Yang
©AFP/File – Paul J. Richards

 

NEW YORK (AFP) – Yahoo announced on Monday that co-founder Jerry Yang, who spurned a 47-billion-dollar takeover offer from Microsoft earlier this year, is stepping down as chief executive of the pioneering Internet company.

“Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock said.

“We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the Board,” he added in a statement.

Yahoo said Yang, who founded the popular Web portal in 1995 at the age of 26 with Stanford University classmate David Filo, would step down as soon as the board of directors finds a new chief executive.

Yang, 40, said it was time to turn the Sunnyvale, California, company, whose share price has plummeted during the past year, over to a new leader.

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang said in a statement.

“When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth,” he said.

“Having set Yahoo on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader,” he said.

“I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation,” Yang added.

Since taking over as chief executive in June 2007, Yang’s stewardship of the company has come in for heavy criticism.

His rejection of Microsoft’s 33-dollar-a-share takeover bid was met with disapproval by many of the company’s shareholders.

A proposed advertising partnership with Internet search king Google fell through this month amid opposition from US Justice Department antitrust regulators. The deal had been expected to earn Yahoo hundreds of millions of dollars in the first year alone.

Yahoo has been trading at around 10-12 dollars a share recently.

Yahoo closed at 10.63 dollars on the Nasdaq in New York on Monday, a loss of 1.76 percent on the day. In after-hours trading following the announcement Yang was stepping down Yahoo gained 4.42 percent to 11.10 dollars.

Yahoo said the company was looking at both internal and external candidates to replace Yang and had retained Heidrick & Struggles, a leading international executive search firm, to assist in the process.

The announcement of Yang’s departure comes less than a month after the company announced plans to lay off at least 10 percent of its workforce, some 1,400 employees, because of the weak economy.

Yahoo’s net profit for the third-quarter of the year was 54 million dollars, or four cents per share, down from 151 million dollars and 11 cents per share during the same period of 2007.

Revenues were 1.78 billion dollars in the third-quarter, an increase of only one percent over the 1.76 billion dollars in the same period last year.

Yahoo has been losing ground on the Internet to companies such as Google, MySpace and Facebook and the economic slowdown has hurt the firm particularly hard as advertisers cut back on spending.

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