Individual Case Analysis (yahoo)

Individual case analysis (Yahoo)

Yahoo is a famous American Internet portal, and this company was started by two graduate students at Stanford University in California, who named David Filo and Jerry Yang in February 1994. Also it has a grown rapidly. At first, Yahoo has offered search engines and portals to enter and navigate the Internet, however now it develop to services include search engine, E-mail, news, etc., has operations in 24 countries and regions, for the world's more than several millions of unique users provide diversified network services. At the same time also is a global Internet communications, commerce and media company.

However, as a so successful company, Yahoo also has trouble and challenge. And now I want to divide into two part to figure out, there are external and internal factors. First of all, the external factor is intense competition and in the industry. In the case, we can know the main competitors is Google and Microsoft. In term of market share survey in March 2012, the top players is Google (66.4 percent), the second Microsoft (15.3 percent), and Yahoo is the third one (13.8 percent). Therefore, Google had held onto its leadership position, Microsoft’s Bing which is new product launched in 2009 had taken market share away from Yahoo and a host of smaller players. Coupled with the successful listing of Alibaba, the development of Yahoo have a certain influence in the future. On the other hand, I want to talk about advertising which is the primary revenue of Yahoo. Their advertising rates did not better than the social networking site like Facebook and Twitter. In the case, it talk about the report in 2012, the average time spent by a user on Facebook was 405 minutes a month, in the other word, the time users spent online on Facebook accounted for 15 percent, Google’s site is 10.6 percent, and 8.6 percent for Yahoo’s sites. Yahoo used to be the Industry Magnates, it is not a good situation for now.

Then, for the internal factor is the loss of talent and senior members of the frequent changes. In general, human resources in the most important resource in the company, especially loss of key senior executives. From the case, we can know the Yahoo has changed 4 CEO and frequent change to replace board member from 2009 to 2012. Also it happened six time of layoffs in the last four years. I believe these should not happen in a successful company.

And now, I want to provide two recommendations for these situation.