Yahoo is said to be laying off nearly 400 odd employees from its Bangalore-based R&D centre,which was one of the company’s second-largest engineering centres outside the US.
As disclosed to several news agencies, Yahoo plans to consolidate its offices “to achieve greater efficiency, collaboration and innovation” across its business. To do this, it is laying off employees in the Bangalore office to consolidate teams into fewer offices. Yahoo has said it will continue operations in Bangalore, despite the mass layoff.
However, insiders believe there’s more to the decision than just a change in the organisational structure. An ex-employee said to The Hindu Business Line that “globally, everytime one of the R&D projects turns into a non-profit making project, it is shut down and the employees are laid off along with the staff in the India R&D Centre who supported that project.”
Another source revealed that top-performing employees have been offered to move closer to the company’s Sunnyvale, California, operations, while those who have been laid off have been given six-month redundancy packages.
The news comes weeks after Yahoo announced the acquisition of Bangalore-based tech firm Bookpad – makers of an online file-editing service called Docspad. The company was to join the Yahoo team in Bangalore, to work on strengthening the Yahoo Mail experience.
As of now, Asia remains a far smaller part of Yahoo’s business than the U.S. Of the $1.04 billion Yahoo posted in revenues in Q2, $177 million came from Asia, while $775 million came from North America.
