New Delhi, Nov 12: Carol Bartz’s mantra for positioning Yahoo! at the ‘centre of people’s online lives’ is simple: “Go where the Internet population is growing.” And India is ‘central’ to her plans to revamp the struggling Internet giant’s operations after signing a long-term search deal with once arch-rival Microsoft.
On a three-day, two-city trip to India, her strategy for the country is focused on mobile phone platforms and partnering content providers who serve relevant content in local languages. “India is the next wave of growth,” she insists, while confirming plans to hire in India even as the company has cut more than 2,000 jobs globally in the past one year.
For Bartz, the Centre’s unique identification number project looks promising. “The UID project involves a huge database. We at Yahoo! have expertise in handling such huge amounts of data,” she explains, having expressed an interest to partner the government in the project during a meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday.
Projects like these are the reasons why emerging markets like India are key to Yahoo!’s revival strategy. “We are bullish on every part of the world where Internet penetration is below 20% and broadband penetration below 10%.” Significantly, Yahoo! does not have a direct presence in China and operates through an agreement with Alibaba.
Bartz has been pushing to change Yahoo!’s direction ever since she replaced co-founder Jerry Yang in January. She signed a ten-year search deal with Microsoft, while Yang had repeatedly rebuffed Microsoft’s unsolicited $47-billion takeover bid.
“The deal makes a lot of sense as it leaves us free to focus on things other than developing search technology,” she says defending the agreement still awaiting regulatory approval. Yahoo!’s latest results indicate she is making some headway as third-quarter profits more than trebled, despite sales falling by around 12%.
Known for her no-nonsense demeanour and spicy vocabulary, she minces no words in expressing displeasure at comparisons with Google. “We are not Google. Google is a search company. We are not a white page with a box. Search is just 3% of what a user does online. The rest of the time they’re connecting, emailing, consuming information and entertainment. That’s where our strength is.”
Pointing out that three out of four people who access the Internet do it through Yahoo!, she says, “We are the world’s biggest media company with 600 million users and 9 billion ads served to them daily.” She says her company’s business model is different from Google’s, pointing to the differences between Yahoo!’s human touch and Google’s algorithmic search programs. “We pretty much stand on our own. We are probably closer to AOL, but we compete with local sites,” she adds.
Having described Yahoo!’s operating margins as “terrible” at an investor conference, she is now focused on tripling them to 15-20% over the next three years. After the pact with Microsoft, she is now betting on a revamp of Yahoo!’s Web portal, supported by a $100-million global advertising campaign. Yahoo! is also opening its home page to rivals, allowing users to integrate third-party Web services like Facebook or Hotmail into its portal.
–Agencies