Ahead of the Bell: Yahoo CEO takes on shareholders
SANTA CLARA, Calif. --Yahoo Inc. shareholders will get their first chance to grill straight-talking Chief Executive Carol Bartz at the Internet company's annual meeting Thursday.
The gathering, to be held at a Santa Clara hotel, is expected to be less contentious than Yahoo's last two annual meetings, where the company's previous two CEOs sparred with testy shareholders demanding to know why their investments had tanked.
Former movie studio boss Terry Semel stepped down as Yahoo's CEO less than a week after facing off with shareholders at the 2007 meeting.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang held on to the CEO reins for a few more months after last year's meeting, where more than one-third of shareholders voted against his re-election to the company's board.
The unusually large percentage of shareholders opposing Yang was considered a rebuke for squandering an opportunity to sell the company to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion in May 2008. Yahoo's market value is currently hovering around $21 billion.
Although he quit as CEO, Yang remains on Yahoo's board and is expected to attend Thursday's meeting.
Bartz, a technology industry veteran hired as Yahoo's CEO in January, already seems to be winning over investors with a no-nonsense style that she sometimes punctuates with profanity. She has spent much of her first five months on the job weeding out Yahoo's bureaucracy and cutting costs -- a process that included laying off about 700 employees, or about 5 percent of the company's work force.
Yahoo's stock has gained 28 percent since Bartz's hiring, even though her changes so far haven't ended the company's three-year streak of declining profits.
Bartz, 60, is being given ample time to turn around the company. Yahoo signed her to a four-year contract that pays her an annual salary of $1 million on top of a $10 million award in cash and restricted stock to compensate her for leaving her previous employer, software maker Autodesk Inc. 