Tech giant Yahoo has begun layoffs in Bangalore, India.
Search engine stalwart Yahoo has reportedly started the restructuring of its Bangalore engineering hub in India, which would include handing out pink slips to at least 400 employees. The move has been made to consolidate the firm’s product engineering teams at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California and limit the functions in India to only support and operations, which means that more than 1,000 jobs will stay intact.
Senior executives such as Hari Vasudev, Yahoo India’s R&D head, have so far been asked to move to the US, while many had already moved there in the past year. It has been reported that the company stopped its hiring process in India a year ago and has been slowly cutting jobs over time.
Reasons cited are so far based on politics, evolving structure of technology and the simple perception in Silicon Valley that it is more beneficial if products for emerging markets are made from the HQ base instead. This perception has mostly stemmed from the success of firms such as Apple and Facebook in emerging markets.
Yahoo is not the only tech company that has majorly withdrawn its product development teams from India. Joining its ranks are firms Google, Cisco, Broadcom and Texas Instruments that have slowly moved their product engineering divisions closer to their headquarters.
Yahoo was one of the first MNCs in 2002 to set up its R&D operations in India, making its the second largest R$D center outside the US, after which companies like Google followed suit.
Photo Credits: India Today
