Yahoo! continues to rein in foreign offices as China operation shuts

19 Mar 2015

Internet giant Yahoo! is closing its sole Chinese operation, with up to 350 employees – primarily engineers and scientists – losing their jobs.

This follows similar cutbacks in Canada and India in the last few months, with the closure of Yahoo!’s Bangalore office (its largest outside the US at the time) seeing 400 people losing their jobs – although they may not have been out of work for long.

A little over a year ago, the Californian tech giant consolidated all its European operations into its Dublin offices, bringing 200 jobs to Ireland, and The Wall Street Journal reported up to 900 global Yahoo! employees have lost their jobs in the past six months.

In Beijing, though, the closure affects Yahoo!’s only tangible operation in the country, meaning Yahoo! now has just two global R&D facilities.

The company said the office served as a R&D facility despite the fact Yahoo! offers no “local product experiences in Beijing”.

“We will be consolidating certain functions into fewer offices, including to our headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, US. Our impacted employees will be treated with respect and fairness through this transition,” said the company.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, this adds to a growing list of companies pulling out of China. Adobe Systems left in December, with Zynga and Microsoft – the latter taking with it 9,000 jobs – also withdrawing.

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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