Monday, September 7, 2009

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Yahoo moving news site development team to Taiwan

Yahoo Inc is moving the product development team for one of its key Web properties to Taiwan, the latest change within the Internet company as it moves to cut costs and revamp its online offering.

The product development and operations teams for the Yahoo News division will be based out of Taiwan, said Yahoo spokeswoman Kim Rubey. The types of jobs moving overseas include product management, engineering and user interface design, Rubey said.

The editorial staff for Yahoo News will remain in Santa Monica, California, where Yahoo's content division is based.

Rubey would not say how many employees currently work in the groups that will be affected by the plan, but said the company does not expect any layoffs as a result of the move, which was first reported on the blog All Things Digital.

"We are not achieving any cost savings in doing this," said Yahoo SVP of Media Products and Solutions Jeff Kinder in an interview with Reuters Thursday, noting the affected U.S. employees will be reassigned to other projects.

Kinder said Yahoo previously had 26 separate news websites for different regions of the world, with disparate computer code bases and content management systems. That made rolling out new features a slow and inefficient process.

By building a single, global news product in Taiwan, Yahoo will be able to speed up innovation, he said.

"At the heart of this it's about accelerating development for us," Kinder said.

The team in Taiwan is made up of existing Yahoo employees who were previously responsible for the company's regional news sites in Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong, said Kinder. The transition began six weeks ago and will last another few months.

News of the move comes a little more than a month after Yahoo announced it would outsource its Internet search technology to Microsoft Corp ( MSFT - news - people ), in a 10-year deal that Yahoo said will save roughly $425 million in operating expenses.

Yahoo has been overhauling its organizational structure and its product offerings since Carol Bartz took the reins as CEO in January. The company unveiled a major redesign of its home page last month, and has also updated key products such as Yahoo Mail, while shutting down underperforming properties such as GeoCities.

In April, Yahoo said it would layoff five percent of its workforce, or roughly 675 employees.

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