Carol Bartz, chief executive of Internet company Yahoo Inc, is shown in this undated publicity photo released on January 13, 2009. ©Reuters

BEIJING, Jan. 26 — Yahoo Inc.’s quarterly earnings doubled in the last three months of 2010 despite its sales fell 4 percent, the Internet group announced Tuesday.

The company’s revenue fell to 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in the fourth quarter of 2010, but its profit doubled to 312 million dollars.

The results raised the doubt among many investors on whether Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is the right person for the job.

Bartz signed a four-year contract with Yahoo as chief executive in January 2009, after the company’s several years of sluggish results.

Yahoo has struggled to boost earnings through layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, but the company’s revenue has fallen since Bartz’s arrival.

“We just completed a very encouraging quarter and year for Yahoo, where we saw our plans to turn round the company gain momentum,” Bartz defended herself in a conference call on Tuesday.

At the same time, Yahoo also announced that it will lay off 100 to 150 employees, roughly 1 percent of its 13,600 people on the payroll at the end of last December.

With a falling revenue, Yahoo has in fact already laid off more than 700 workers in the past two months.

Yahoo shares fell 38 cents, or 2.4 percent, to 15.64 dollars Tuesday after the results were released. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-01/26/c_13708005.htm

Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek said the move is the first time that the company has required most of its 13,200 employees to use vacation time during the holidays.

Shutting down “during a traditionally slow week allows employees to recharge, and the company to reduce operating costs for the week,” said Lengkeek.

Yahoo’s U.S. employees can use vacation time or take unpaid leave for the days not covered in the holiday schedule. Outside the U.S., “time off will be paid consistent with local standards and laws,” according to the spokeswoman.

Employees performing essential duties, such as customer support, will still be working during this time.

Executives at Yahoo have been on a cost-cutting campaign since the start of this year, laying off nearly 700 employees in the spring and shutting down duplicative products. Yahoo ended the third quarter of 2009 with 13,200 employees.

The campaign has helped offset a 12 percent decline in Yahoo’s revenue through the first nine months of this year. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/22/content_12687710.htm

Icahn made the sale in the stock market’s last three trading sessions, stated a Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The shares were traded at prices ranging between 14.74 and 14.93 U.S. dollars each, but Icahn paid an average of about 25 dollars per share when he bought most of his Yahoo stake last year. Up to now, 62.9 million shares are still under Icahn’s control.

Icahn made this decision just a month after Microsoft Corp roped Yahoo Inc. into an Internet search partnership. Yahoo’s stock has fallen by 15 percent since it struck the Microsoft deal in July and its shares fell 24 cents Monday to close at 14.61 dollars.

In the SEC filing, Icahn described the sales as part of an effort to balance his portfolio of technology investments. He said he remains optimistic about Yahoo’s long-term prospects with Bartz at the helm and believes in “the wisdom” of the Microsoft partnership. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2009-09/02/c_1339222.htm

Yahoo said the latest Messenger version was launched Monday, upgrades to email were also released to U.S. users Monday and to the rest of the world in a few weeks, and Yahoo Search will be rolled out later this year.

Yahoo said it is working to develop a new page design for Yahoo Search to deliver results that are more relevant to users’ queries, including Search Assist — a realtime query suggestion engine.

The redesigned Yahoo Mail will have more photo-sharing capabilities and social-networking functions, such as displaying recent emails from social networking contacts, links to photo albums and birthday reminders, according to Yahoo.

The new Yahoo Messenger will have high-quality video calling capabilities that enables users to take full-screen, face-to-face chats.

The rapidly growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook put the Internet portal under great pressure. In July the company said its second-quarter revenue fell 13 percent. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-08/25/content_11940997.htm

About 15 months after Microsoft’s unsuccessful bid to buy Yahoo, the two companies successfully made a deal that Yahoo will have Microsoft’s search technology used on its websites.

In this deal, Yahoo will completely give up its own efforts in web search to challenge Google, and instead rely on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Ads placed next to Yahoo’s search results would be served up not by Yahoo’s own ad platform, but by a Microsoft technology called AdCenter.

The two companies will split the revenue generated from the ads.

The partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo would help the two companies to compete with the dominant Google in the search market.

In a most recent report, Yahoo’s search engine ranks No. 2 with a worldwide market share of 8 percent, while Google holds 67 percent of the global share. In the United States, Google’s share is 65 percent compared to about 20 percent for Yahoo. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-07/29/content_11791978.htm