Yahoo Investor Wants Firm To Lay Off 9000 Staff

Yahoo is facing pressure from investor groups against giving CEO Marissa Mayer more time to show progress on the company’s turnaround, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Jackson said he has sent Yahoo’s board a 99-page slide presentation which details a plan to turn around the struggling Internet business by slimming it down and focusing on a few areas where the company excels, such as its sports and finance sites. And Canyon Capital Advisors sent a letter to Yahoo’s board on Friday urging the board to find a buyer for Yahoo’s core Internet business.

Starboard hasn’t commented publicly on the plan Yahoo unveiled last week, and has not responded to our request for comment. Canyon Capital’s strongly worded letter to fellow investors proclaimed that waiting another year to break Yahoo up from its Alibaba holdings is unacceptable.

But the tech firm stuck by its intention to separate out its activities under the new structure, a move that could open the door to a sale of Yahoo’s core online operations (Other OTC: UBGXF – news).

She and her husband have a 3-year-old son, Macallister. The investor wrote that Yahoo needs to start selling parts of its business off now or risk a further decline in the worth of the company.

SpringOwl distributed a presentation arguing that the company should replace Mayer and slash costs by eliminating some 9,000 positions.

SpringOwl, a roughly US$300 million fund managed by activist investor Jason Ader, is pushing Yahoo to cut costs and bring in a strategic partner such as Liberty Media to help deal with tax issues. “I think the basic strategy that he was advocating was in hindsight the right strategy”, Jackson said. A more disruptive plan came from Eric Jackson, managing director at SpringOwl, an investment firm with a minority share in Yahoo. The company also said it did not plan to sell itself, and some long-disgruntled investors aren’t OK with that.

Yahoo scrapped the spinoff of its Alibaba holdings, after the company failed to get prior approval from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service on the transaction’s tax-free status.

SpringOwl’s sentiment contrasts with that of Starboard Value, the activist investor that prompted Yahoo to announce last week that it was pursuing a different course.

Specifics about where he is headed to was undisclosed, however, Yahoo! stated that he will go back to his “startup roots”, working with early-stage companies and entrepreneurs.