Yahoo job cuts claim half of Dubai staff

Yahoo has fired almost half of its staff in Dubai as the internet company continues its global restructuring efforts.

The company refused to share the number of employees that had been affected by the decision, but several former employees said that out of the 100 or so working in Dubai, just 40 to 50 remain, while a few have been relocated to the London office.

Yahoo was adamant that its office in Dubai would remain open.

A spokesperson for Yahoo said that the recent moves were part of “efforts to streamline our … operations and realign resources and investments” to set the business up in the region “on a path of sustainable growth”.

The redundancies follow the closure of Yahoo’s Cairo and Jordan offices last year.

Employees were told in October that there would be redundancies by Dawn Airey, the Europe, Middle East and Africa chief.

The company has also shut offices in Vietnam, Malaysia and Hungary and has laid off some 400 employees in India.

“Yahoo has been pulling out of a number of territories, notably Korea in 2013, as well as shutting a number of US offices in 2014,” said Richard Kramer, the managing director at Arete Research Services. “This [the Dubai redundancies] is consistent with Yahoo management’s focus on costs.”

Yahoo acquired the Jordan-based Maktoob in 2009 for US$164 million as a means to bolster its presence in the Middle East. While the local website would reach about a million unique visitors a day, the company was failing to drum up sufficient advertising revenue in the face of increasing competition from Google and Facebook as well as Twitter, which have all taken a greater focus on the region.

Yahoo Maktoob will maintain its Arabic content portal, but has fired its content creators for the English page and is now sourcing news from other outlets. The company also announced in its fourth-quarter report it would shut down Maktoob Forums.

The Europe, Middle East and Africa region as a whole accounted for just over $250m in revenue in the nine-months to September, a fraction of Yahoo’s $3.36 billion in global revenue during the same period.

The internet company has been struggling to maintain growth over the past few years.

The chief executive, Marissa Meyer, a former Google employee who joined Yahoo in 2012, initially eschewed job cuts and instead focused on other savings, according to Nicholas Carlson, the author of Marissa Meyer and the Fight to Save Yahoo. Since her joining, Yahoo's share price has risen from $15 to about $50 now, although many believe this is due to Yahoo's 15 per cent stake in the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, which raised $25bn in a September initial public offering.

“The company’s fundamentals have disappointed many, in part because the company is dealing with significant technology shifts, competition, and product transitions,” said Scott Kessler, a senior internet equity analyst at S&P Capital IQ. “Frankly, there are a lot of questions as to what its future will hold.”

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