UPDATED 11:12 EDT / OCTOBER 26 2015

NEWS

Under pressure: Might Marissa Mayer jump ship too?

A number of recent high-level executive departures at Yahoo! Inc. suggests that company’s turnaround under CEO Marissa Mayer is rapidly losing momentum, little more than three years after she took over the reins.

The most recent names to abandon ship were corporate development head Jackie Reses, who is taking up a role at financial services firm Square Inc., just days after Lisa Licht, a senior marketing executive, also threw in the towel. These two names are part of a growing list of executive departures at Yahoo! compiled by Re/Code‘s Kara Swisher, spanning almost all of its key departments from sales to engineering.

Of course executives in Silicon Valley switch their jobs with abandon all of the time, and so the departures at Yahoo aren’t necessarily suggestive of any storms brewing. But then again, the last time a high profile tech company began dropping executives like flies, it wasn’t long before it was acquired for a whopping $67 billion, so the situation at Yahoo also cannot be ignored.

The problem is these upheavals come at a time when shareholders are growing restless over the company’s stalled turnaround effort. For all the fanfare and acquisitions in the early days of Mayer’s reign, the company has struggled to drive any significant growth. And the Yahoo brand is still looked upon with disdain by the overwhelming majority of the ‘millenials’ it said it was trying to attract.

Admittedly Yahoo’s stock price has doubled since Mayer took over as CEO, but most analysts believe that’s only due to its huge 15 percent stake in China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Limited. A closer look at at Yahoo’s financial performance reveals that its revenues have been flat for years, while its adjusted earnings before taxes and depreciation are equally uninspiring. Moreover, the company missed on earnings in its most recent financial quarter, with $0.17 per share of net income, down from $0.52 per share a year ago.

These results suggest that Mayer’s strategy of focusing on new efforts in mobile and with platforms like Tumblr and native advertising has largely failed. Now, one can’t help thinking Mayer has switched her focus to the planned spin-off of its 15 percent stake in Alibaba, which she and Yahoo’s shareholders desperately want to make tax free.

In public Mayer is still bullish on Yahoo’s prospects, but she’s also said the Alibaba spin-off could happen in as little as two months, by January 2016, even though the IRS has refused to give its blessing to the move. But even if Yahoo does have to pay some tax, the shareholders should still be happy enough that Mayer will be able claim her tenure at the company was a successful one – perhaps, just before she makes her own hasty departure and lets someone else try to kickstart the company’s stalled “turnaround”.

Photo Credit: Teymur Visuals via Compfight cc

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