It was announced Wednesday by the ADP, the payroll processor, that the private sector in the United States added over 200,000 jobs in March. Nearly half of them were added by small businesses. On the same day, Yahoo announced that it would cut its workforce by 2,000, which is 14% of its employees and the largest layoff in the history of the company in its 17-year history. The cuts will help save about $375 million annually, and this was the first major decision under new CEO Scott Thompson, who was quoted to say that these cuts were needed to make the company “smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate."
Shares of Yahoo actually climbed 9 cents to close at 15.27 Wednesday. But these figures are way shy of the company's heydays. Shares topped over $100 in early 2000, and even as late as 2005, topped over $40. While the S&P has recovered the losses since 2008, Yahoo's shares have not climbed above $20 since end of 2008. Financials show that total annual revenues have fallen from $7.2 billion in 2008 to just under $5 in 2011. In fact, Yahoo's revenue of $353,000 per employee is far below the $1.2 million mark observed in Google and Facebook, and also less than half of that of Microsoft. Much of these figure underscore the failure of Yahoo to capture social networking and competition it faces in advertisement. In recent months under Thompson, Yahoo has also sought to sue Facebook for patent infringements. Facebook has filed a countersuit against Yahoo.
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