SINGAPORE, Nov 25 — Yahoo’s new boss has a fairly simple default setting when it comes to competitors and critics — let’s “kick some butt”, as she once put it — so it was no surprise that the message on a recent visit here was pretty forceful. The Internet pioneer is back in the game after some dreadful years of falling revenues and media derision, says chief executive Carol Bartz, ready to make major deals, ready to take on all comers, ready to, well...kick some butt.
Bartz displayed her fighting spirit with business chiefs and media here earlier this month at a talk organised by the American Chamber of Commerce on the sidelines of the Apec meetings.
She underlined that a potential weapon in Yahoo’s armoury — a search deal with Microsoft — remains on track. That is just the kind of good news investors are looking for as the beleaguered Yahoo tries to regain its punch.
Local investors will also be pleased with another reassurance, this time a pledge that Singapore will stay front and centre in the company’s all-important emerging market strategy.
But while Bartz suggested where the battle lines might be, she wants to keep things simple — keep doing what Yahoo is good at, expand globally and interact better with users and advertisers
Mission statements don’t come much starker than that but Bartz knows Yahoo has a mountain to climb after some dire years of failed deals with Microsoft and Google and a plunging stock price.
Clearing up misconceptions about Yahoo is top of the agenda, she says, adding that she was happily surprised to find out that many people around the world still hold Yahoo, which has over 500 million users, in high regard.
The problem for the company has been criticism from media and analysts for not getting key deals done.
Bartz, in her famous straight- talking manner, said in her first analysts’ conference a few days after taking over in January this year that she wanted to ensure Yahoo got breathing room so it could “kick some butt’.
The tone is a bit more subdued when she sits down with The Straits Times at the Ritz-Carlton Millenia. Dressed in a bright red jacket and black pantsuit, she looks more like a suburban soccer mum than one of the most powerful women in business.
But striding into the room, her feistiness and vivacity are apparent as she demands one, then changes her mind to two, glasses of Diet Coke with ice — “I need my caffeine hit”.
Asked if she wants to wait for the drinks before we start, she quips: “I can walk and chew gum at the same time”, before bursting out in laughter when it’s pointed out to her that in Singapore that might not be possible.
She turns serious once we start talking about her plans for Yahoo.
“With the press and the investment community, it is really about being out there, being vocal with our strategy, because nothing gets attention like results.”
The strategy, she says, “is really the same strategy that Yahoo has had”.
“We are the largest media company in the world, with our user base, so therefore using the insights we know, we track advertisers,” says Bartz.
“So what do we owe our users? We owe them an awesome experience so they continue to engage with us. And we owe all our advertisers good targeting insights about those users.
“It’s not that complex. It’s actually very straightforward.”
Bartz, who also visited India on this trip, is no stranger to battles.
She lost her mother at the age of eight, put herself through college and grew up being one of the few females who liked and excelled in mathematics.
Her elevation to the chief executive’s chair of design software firm Autodesk in 1994 made her one of the first female CEOs of a tech company.
Triumph almost became tragedy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer on her first day as Autodesk boss but the chemotherapy worked and Bartz turned the company into a billion-dollar venture over the next 14 years.
That steely grit is what Yahoo needs in spades, but some critics still ask what a 61-year-old mother knows about running an Internet company.
Bartz, who initially rejected several overtures for the position, has responded by aggressively cutting costs in her first 11 months, breaking down organisational barriers and reaching out to Yahoo’s 13,500 employees.
Yahoo operates in 40 countries in 25 different languages but Bartz says that the company simply hadn’t thought globally enough.
“I got here and thought why was only 25 per cent of our revenue global? It should be half. So we have much more of a global push and a real renewed focus on making sure our customers have great experiences on our sites and our advertisers have great relationships with us.”
Yahoo’s third quarter revenue was down 12 per cent from last year to US$1.6 billion (RM5.4 billion) after a 13 per cent dip in the second quarter.
She has set a goal of raising what she called “pathetic” and “terrible” operating margins of 6 per cent to between 15 and 20 per cent in the next two to three years.
And this is where Singapore comes in. It is at the heart of that growth strategy, serving 75 per cent of Yahoo’s operations as the South-east Asian and emerging markets headquarters. These include not only Asia but Latin America and Africa.
Yet with all the action — a killer search deal in the making, a US$100 million advertising campaign, job numbers slashed by 5 per cent and countless interviews — the opinions on her are still divided.
Activist investor Carl Icahn, who joined the board last year in protest at the failed deal with Microsoft, resigned as a director recently, saying in a letter that he wished Bartz could be cloned “because so many of the companies in the country could use a Carol Bartz as CEO”.
On the other hand, critics have labelled her aggressive tactics as an unnecessary ego trip yet to yield results. And the elephant in the room still remains — how will Yahoo compete with Google?
Google rules the Internet with over 700 million visitors a month and supremacy in online
hile Bartz has admitted that Google is a “fierce competitor”, she is defiant, insisting that competing with it is not the be all and end all of Yahoo’s existence.
“I’m not taking on Google, we are in a totally different business,” she says. “Only half our business is search. Our customers come to us to get informed.”
Search is only 3 per cent of Internet use, she says. The rest is spent “being informed and engaging socially”.
And she believes there is more than enough room in the Internet universe for Google and Yahoo: “Brands aren’t defined by key words, they also do emotional branding and traffic branding. So just like there’s not just one magazine in the world, or one newspaper, or one TV network, there’re all kinds of places where advertisers spend their money.”
But like any other business, market share is important, and ultimately Yahoo wants to be “the centre of people’s lives online”. So the good news for users is that it means understanding more of what they want.
“They are looking for more opinions, they want to know gradings, they always want to know gossip and entertainment, as well as hard news, and financial information,” she says.
“If you have that one-stop feeling, you wake up one morning, your home on the Internet is Yahoo.
Bartz displayed her fighting spirit with business chiefs and media here earlier this month at a talk organised by the American Chamber of Commerce on the sidelines of the Apec meetings.She underlined that a potential weapon in Yahoo’s armoury — a search deal with Microsoft — remains on track. That is just the kind of good news investors are looking for as the beleaguered Yahoo tries to regain its punch.
Local investors will also be pleased with another reassurance, this time a pledge that Singapore will stay front and centre in the company’s all-important emerging market strategy.
But while Bartz suggested where the battle lines might be, she wants to keep things simple — keep doing what Yahoo is good at, expand globally and interact better with users and advertisers
Mission statements don’t come much starker than that but Bartz knows Yahoo has a mountain to climb after some dire years of failed deals with Microsoft and Google and a plunging stock price.
Clearing up misconceptions about Yahoo is top of the agenda, she says, adding that she was happily surprised to find out that many people around the world still hold Yahoo, which has over 500 million users, in high regard.
The problem for the company has been criticism from media and analysts for not getting key deals done.
Bartz, in her famous straight- talking manner, said in her first analysts’ conference a few days after taking over in January this year that she wanted to ensure Yahoo got breathing room so it could “kick some butt’.
The tone is a bit more subdued when she sits down with The Straits Times at the Ritz-Carlton Millenia. Dressed in a bright red jacket and black pantsuit, she looks more like a suburban soccer mum than one of the most powerful women in business.
But striding into the room, her feistiness and vivacity are apparent as she demands one, then changes her mind to two, glasses of Diet Coke with ice — “I need my caffeine hit”.
Asked if she wants to wait for the drinks before we start, she quips: “I can walk and chew gum at the same time”, before bursting out in laughter when it’s pointed out to her that in Singapore that might not be possible.
She turns serious once we start talking about her plans for Yahoo.
“With the press and the investment community, it is really about being out there, being vocal with our strategy, because nothing gets attention like results.”
The strategy, she says, “is really the same strategy that Yahoo has had”.
“We are the largest media company in the world, with our user base, so therefore using the insights we know, we track advertisers,” says Bartz.
“So what do we owe our users? We owe them an awesome experience so they continue to engage with us. And we owe all our advertisers good targeting insights about those users.
“It’s not that complex. It’s actually very straightforward.”
Bartz, who also visited India on this trip, is no stranger to battles.
She lost her mother at the age of eight, put herself through college and grew up being one of the few females who liked and excelled in mathematics.
Her elevation to the chief executive’s chair of design software firm Autodesk in 1994 made her one of the first female CEOs of a tech company.
Triumph almost became tragedy when she was diagnosed with breast cancer on her first day as Autodesk boss but the chemotherapy worked and Bartz turned the company into a billion-dollar venture over the next 14 years.
That steely grit is what Yahoo needs in spades, but some critics still ask what a 61-year-old mother knows about running an Internet company.
Bartz, who initially rejected several overtures for the position, has responded by aggressively cutting costs in her first 11 months, breaking down organisational barriers and reaching out to Yahoo’s 13,500 employees.
Yahoo operates in 40 countries in 25 different languages but Bartz says that the company simply hadn’t thought globally enough.
“I got here and thought why was only 25 per cent of our revenue global? It should be half. So we have much more of a global push and a real renewed focus on making sure our customers have great experiences on our sites and our advertisers have great relationships with us.”
Yahoo’s third quarter revenue was down 12 per cent from last year to US$1.6 billion (RM5.4 billion) after a 13 per cent dip in the second quarter.
She has set a goal of raising what she called “pathetic” and “terrible” operating margins of 6 per cent to between 15 and 20 per cent in the next two to three years.
And this is where Singapore comes in. It is at the heart of that growth strategy, serving 75 per cent of Yahoo’s operations as the South-east Asian and emerging markets headquarters. These include not only Asia but Latin America and Africa.
Yet with all the action — a killer search deal in the making, a US$100 million advertising campaign, job numbers slashed by 5 per cent and countless interviews — the opinions on her are still divided.
Activist investor Carl Icahn, who joined the board last year in protest at the failed deal with Microsoft, resigned as a director recently, saying in a letter that he wished Bartz could be cloned “because so many of the companies in the country could use a Carol Bartz as CEO”.
On the other hand, critics have labelled her aggressive tactics as an unnecessary ego trip yet to yield results. And the elephant in the room still remains — how will Yahoo compete with Google?
Google rules the Internet with over 700 million visitors a month and supremacy in online
hile Bartz has admitted that Google is a “fierce competitor”, she is defiant, insisting that competing with it is not the be all and end all of Yahoo’s existence.
“I’m not taking on Google, we are in a totally different business,” she says. “Only half our business is search. Our customers come to us to get informed.”
Search is only 3 per cent of Internet use, she says. The rest is spent “being informed and engaging socially”.
And she believes there is more than enough room in the Internet universe for Google and Yahoo: “Brands aren’t defined by key words, they also do emotional branding and traffic branding. So just like there’s not just one magazine in the world, or one newspaper, or one TV network, there’re all kinds of places where advertisers spend their money.”
But like any other business, market share is important, and ultimately Yahoo wants to be “the centre of people’s lives online”. So the good news for users is that it means understanding more of what they want.
“They are looking for more opinions, they want to know gradings, they always want to know gossip and entertainment, as well as hard news, and financial information,” she says.
“If you have that one-stop feeling, you wake up one morning, your home on the Internet is Yahoo.
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