Yahoo said on Thursday it was freezing employee pay as it worked to curtail costs and improve the pioneering Internet firm’s fortunes.
The news came five days before Yahoo was expected to announce its earnings for the final quarter of last year.
“The executive team decided that providing annual salary increases would not be in the best interests of the company or shareholders,” Yahoo spokeswoman Kim Rubey said.
Some analysts were predicting that newly-appointed chief executive Carol Bartz would shake-up Yahoo.
Veteran Silicon Valley executive Bartz took over the helm of Yahoo last week, vowing to revive the ailing Internet giant and calling on critics to give it room to breathe.
Bartz, 60, replaces Yahoo founder Jerry Yang (楊致遠), who stepped down on Nov. 18 after a rocky tenure as chief executive of the Sunnyvale, California, firm that lasted a little over a year.
Yahoo has been outshined by Internet-search star Google and stumbling in the wake of a failed courtship with Microsoft, which offered last year to buy Yahoo for nearly US$47 billion. Yang rejected Microsoft’s US$33-a-share takeover bid.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said on Thursday that the US software giant remained interested in a search business partnership with Yahoo and welcomed the appointment of Bartz.
“I’ve been quite public about the fact that there are advantages for advertisers and consumers, for Microsoft and for Yahoo through a search partnership, and we’d like to do one,” Ballmer said. “I know Carol Bartz well from Autodesk days, and I like to see her at the helm of Yahoo. If it’s appropriate I’m sure we’ll have the right discussions.”
CLASH OF WORDS: While China’s foreign minister insisted the US play a constructive role with China, Rubio stressed Washington’s commitment to its allies in the region The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday affirmed and welcomed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio statements expressing the US’ “serious concern over China’s coercive actions against Taiwan” and aggressive behavior in the South China Sea, in a telephone call with his Chinese counterpart. The ministry in a news release yesterday also said that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had stated many fallacies about Taiwan in the call. “We solemnly emphasize again that our country and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other, and it has been an objective fact for a long time, as well as
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GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
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