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Yahoo Looks for New CEO
Tim Koogle is stepping aside as chief executive of struggling Internet bellwether Yahoo, but he will stay as chairman.
The company also announced Wednesday that its first-quarter operating earnings will come in at "approximately break-even," well short of Wall Street's expectations.
Koogle, who will remain CEO until a successor is found, said Yahoo needs an infusion of talent.
Koogle �� known as "TK" at the company �� joined Yahoo after serving as president of Seattle-based Intermec and spending nine years as an executive at Motorola. He became Yahoo's chairman in 1999.
After starting as a search engine in the mid-1990s, Yahoo grew into a full-service information and shopping portal and at one point became the world's most popular destinations on the Internet. Yahoo also was one of the Internet's biggest financial success stories for a while, with revenue nearly doubling last year, to $1.1 billion, and profits of $291 million.
But the company's dependence on advertising �� which accounted for nearly 90% of last year's revenue �� has proven to be a problem in the dot-com meltdown and the overall slowing of the economy.
Yahoo had more than 55 million unique visitors in January, behind America Online's and Microsoft's sites, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. It was the first time since July 2000 that Yahoo trailed Microsoft.
By comparison, AOL had more than 64 million unique visitors and Microsoft had 56.2 million. The number is a count of distinct users who visited a Web site at least once in a given month.
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