Yahoo closes office in Indonesia this month

Rumors swirled around Yahoo’s major restructuring in November, and yesterday the tech giant confirmed (via Detik) that the company is shutting its Indonesia office this month.

Besides Indonesia, Yahoo is reportedly laying off its employees in Malaysia and Vietnam too. In October, the tech giant laid off hundreds in India.

Barsha Panda, Yahoo head of corporate communications in India and Southeast Asia, tells Tech in Asia the following:

Yahoo is not exiting Indonesia market. We are committed to delivering quality products and great experiences for our users and advertisers here. International markets are important to Yahoo and are an integral part of our growth strategy.

A decision like this is not taken lightly – and it’s one we put in a lot of careful thought and consideration. As we look to accelerate the growth of Yahoo’s business, there is a need to improve the way we operate and execute more quickly and efficiently. This is in line with Yahoo’s global efforts to streamline operations to achieve greater efficiency, collaboration and innovation.

So Yahoo’s local products like Yahoo ID will continue to operate in Indonesia, but it will be handled by the Singapore team. Yahoo is laying off most of its reportedly 50 employees in Indonesia, while a small number of them will join the regional office in Singapore.

See: 5 of America’s biggest tech companies wouldn’t survive without Asia

Yahoo’s progress in Indonesia

Since opening office in Indonesia in 2010, Yahoo has done some memorable things to excite the local tech scene. The first and most memorable one was acquiring local location-based social network Koprol in May 2010. At its peak, the social network had 1.5 million registered users, with 90 percent of them being Indonesians.

Sadly, the Koprol project was shut down two years after, following Yahoo’s global layoffs in 2012. Yahoo explained that Koprol did not meaningfully contribute to Yahoo’s user engagement nor revenue. Yahoo agreed to return Koprol’s intellectual property to the founders.

Yahoo’s Indonesia homepage seems to be doing well. The id.Yahoo.com website is the fifth-most popular website in Indonesia according to SimilarWeb. In January this year, 19.1 million unique visitors opened the Yahoo ID homepage, making it the most popular Yahoo homepage in Southeast Asia during that time.

In the space of four years, Yahoo has been led by two different country heads: Pontus Sonnerstedt and Roy Arnold Simangunsong. Although the latter resigned in February, no one was hired to replace him.

Yahoo Indonesia has quite a strong following on its social media accounts. The company has over 3.3 million followers on Facebook and Twitter. What will happen to it? Regarding this, Panda says that they cannot share details about the social media accounts at the moment, and will not comment on future plans in regards to their products and media properties.

This is an interesting move, seeing that Indonesia might be Yahoo’s biggest market in Southeast Asia. And while other tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Baidu are following the trend of opening offices in the archipelago, Yahoo is going in the opposite direction.

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Yahoo closes office in Indonesia this month