Yahoo announced Wednesday that is closing its office in Beijing.
We are constantly making changes to align resources, and to foster better collaboration and innovation across our business, said an emailed statement from spokeswoman Carolyn Clark. Today we informed our employees based in Beijing that we will be closing our office there. We currently do not offer local product experiences in Beijing but the office has served as a research and development center.
We will be consolidating certain functions into fewer offices, including to our headquarters in Sunnyvale, Clark wrote. Our impacted employees will be treated with respect and fairness through this transition.
About 350 workers, mostly engineers and scientists, worked at the center in China s capital, according to the South China Morning Post, which said layoffs will begin later this month.
This is the latest in a series of layoffs at Yahoo in recent months that also hit operations in Canada and India. There s also been an ongoing trickle of layoffs at the company s headquarters in Silicon Valley.
There were also large teams (in the double digits) of designers, engineers, and others laid off (March 10) from the Sunnyvale and Santa Monica offices, one employee told me last week. Morale is extremely low at the moment, executives have been completely quiet on the issue, products are in limbo, and most people fear this is not the end of layoffs.
Above: Yahoo s Sunnyvale campus. (Gary Reyes / Bay Area News Group)