On July 16, 2012, Yahoo announced that it is hiring Google executive Marissa Mayer as its new CEO. She is an intelligent as well as intensely focused on details executive. At Google she helped the company to surpass Yahoo and gain the search supremacy. For many years she was in charge of Google’s search group. Mayer is the seventh Yahoo CEO within last five years.
She joins Yahoo at a critical time where it faces many difficulties. Yahoo is experiencing declining revenue, losing market share to others, a workforce that is considered stagnating, and the talent pool leaving the company. Yahoo’s over all share from ad revenue in the U.S. dropped from 15.7 percent in 2009 to 9.5 percent in 2011. The CEO turnaround at Yahoo within last five years has created many doubts about its future. The new CEO is expected to address all these and many other situations that plague the company.
But Yahoo still has some bright spots. More than 700 million still visit the site monthly. It has $2.4 billion in cash. It also owns a stake in Yahoo Japan and the China’s Alibaba.com. Yahoo may not be too late to enter into smartphone and tablet advertising.