LONDON (Brand Republic) 鈥 Yahoo!, the troubled internet portal, has been dealt another blow with its second high-profile resignation in two days.
Savio Chow, managing director and vice-president for Yahoo! in Asia excluding Japan and South Korea, announced on Friday that he is stepping down for personal reasons. The departure came just one day after Fabiola Arrendondo, the managing director of Yahoo! Europe, resigned to 鈥減ursue private business interests鈥.
Arrendondo is credited with building the company鈥檚 European operations from scratch into a business with $100m (£69m) revenues, 31m unique users and 500 employees.
Coming after Arrendondo鈥檚 resignation, Chow鈥檚 departure is bound to have a far-reaching impact. Yahoo!鈥檚 share price has dropped 7% to $28 (£19.27) after the news, despite attempts to limit the damage on Friday by chairman and chief executive Tim Koogle. The share price is currently 85% lower than its high of $205 (£141) last year. Koogle outlined measures to boost subscription revenues, which may mean that Yahoo! charges for its business and entertainment online services in future.
Yahoo! derives 90% of its revenues from online advertising. It is thought that revenues during the current three months could fall 25% quarter on quarter.
A report out tomorrow is expected to show Yahoo! losing more ground to rival site MSN.com, Microsoft鈥檚 website, which overtook Yahoo! last June. Statistics from internet research company Jupiter MMXI show MSN reaching more than 5.5m unique users in January, compared with 5.3m in December. Yahoo!鈥檚 number of unique users has remained unchanged at 4.6m.
Jupiter鈥檚 figures show that 43% of the UK population visit MSN compared with 35% visiting Yahoo!.
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