Well, it's no HUGE shock (unless you work there) but Yahoo Taiwan is following its global big brother's demand for blood and is chucking out a bunch of staff today. Sources tell me they will be axing many today and about 100 total. So if you didn't get your pink slip yet it may be on its way.

Yahoo Taiwan (aka Yahoo-Kimo) has 500 or so staff in Taiwan. They also own an online shopping company called Monday with 400 or so staffers. I couldn't confirm if the 100 redundancies will come from the total 900-odd employees or only from the main Yahoo office. If the latter is true than this is very unfortunate and represents 20% of their local workforce. This is also a not insignificant number out of a reported 1,500 jobs cut by Yahoo worldwide.

I'm told that among the unlucky will be R&D staff and, of course, those in the sales and marketing division. If Google Taiwan still has designs on bringing down the house, then this would be an opportunity for them: HIRE some of these peeps, PUMP cash into Taiwan (I know, it's counter to the prevailing winds), and seize the day and make the Yahoo Taiwan suckers RUE firing all these guys.

Another way of looking at this is as a real comeuppance for Yahoo Taiwan, at least for the senior management. Nearly EVERY week, including just a few days ago (and previously chronicled in this column), there is some kind of PR puffery "news" story about "we have great online shopping sales" and "we're so great," yada yada. As I pointed out these stories suspiciously usually lack any kind of hard data such as what exactly Yahoo Taiwan's local sales are. Well, it's no surprise that they were clearly trying to b.s. everyone and the lies have caught up with them.

Hopefully it means we'll stop seeing spin in the press from Yahoo, and that Google will seize this opportunity and finally rid us of this poorly managed lot. It's funny, a senior Yahoo HQ-based staffer told me not long ago that their Taiwan branch is the superstar in their network and could do no wrong. She said no one at HQ cares that their office here is run poorly as long as the numbers "look" good. Well, the chickens have come home...

More to come,
jag

 

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