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Welcome to the Investors Trading Academy event of the week. Each week our staff of educators
tries to introduce you to a person of interest in the financial world. This could be a person
in government or banking or an important investors or trader.
Over the past few months Marissa Mayer has been in the headlines as she seems to be blamed
for all the problems plaguing social media and search giant Yahoo. Prior to joining Yahoo,
she spent 13 years at Google, where her work in product development largely contributed
to the site's unique look and feel. At the time of Mayer's Yahoo appointment, she was
one of only 20 female CEOs in charge of a Fortune 500 company. Her tenure at Google
involved work on some of the company's most recognizable and successful products, including
Google Maps, Google Earth, Street View, Google News and Gmail.
In July 2012, she was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo, a company besieged by declining
stock prices, layoffs and slowing ad revenue. Tasked with course-correcting the company,
Mayer became the fifth CEO hired by Yahoo in five years.
Yahoo was one of the two biggest Internet companies in the world with nearly 650 million
unique users visiting their website every month. It started off a web directory but
has progressed to include categories like news, mail, finance, maps, sports and much
more. It has become a mini universe where people can find all the resources they need
to work on the internet. It offers its services in 30 languages and
in 2013 was the most used portal in the U.S. overtaking longtime rival Google. In 2012,
it earned profits of $3.94 billion against a revenue of $5 billion. That is 79% profit
percentage on the revenue earned which is the highest among all the Fortune 500 companies.
Former Yahoo President Susan Decker said a string of leaders failed to address the company's
core issue: defining what Yahoo is to its users. Decker, a board director at Berkshire
Hathaway, Costco, and other companies, spoke ahead of Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting.
While Google and Facebook have branched out into various businesses, their customers still
know them primarily as search and social destinations, respectively, Decker said.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer did her best to turn around the company, but it is now virtually
inevitable that Yahoo will be sold, Decker said.
Yahoo’s board is weighing whether to sell the company’s still-widely used Internet
operations like its sports, finance, and email after Mayer failed to turnaround the business
during her nearly four-year tenure as CEO. Mayer’s $36 million salary last year and
even bigger severance packages, in some cases, have generated intense criticism in the past
because of the company’s poor performance. The latest severance for a so-called “change
is control,” or takeover, is likely to add fuel to the fire.
The Yahoo chief's pay package jumped 69% to $42 million in 2014, making her one of the
country's highest-paid CEOs. Since taking the helm three years ago, Marissa Mayer has
upgraded content -- including hiring journalists Katie Couric and Matt Bai -- and pursued an
aggressive acquisition strategy aimed at boosting mobile revenues. But sales growth has remained
sluggish, and Mayer has faced pressure from activist investors to cut costs and improve
financial performance.