Earlier this month, Yahoo! hired Timothy Morse as the new CFO. Morse is the former CFO of Altera. While Morse was at Altera, operating margins increase from 23% in 1Q 2007 to 31% in 2Q 2008.
“Growth companies and high-tech companies have traditionally been very successful in innovating the topline and finding new ways to grow; it hasn’t always been that balanced equation looking at capital and cost structure,” stated Morse at a tech conference in 2007.
Morse was able to cut costs without major layoffs at Altera. Only 33 people were laid off last December. Yahoo! CFO Blake Jorgensen left Yahoo! because he believed the CFO was more of a strategic position, but Yahoo! CEO believed that they needed more of a cost-controller.
Timothy Morse became the CFO and SVP of Altera Corporation back in January 2007. Before that he was the CFO and General Manager of Business Development at GE Plastics. He had worked at General Electric for 15 years. Morse has just been hired to become the CFO of Yahoo! as the replacement of Blake Jorgensen.
Morse’s responsibilities will include managing the company’s finance and investor relations. He will also oversee M&A possibilities. Morse will be starting on July 1. Altera Corporation is a semiconductor company.
Say what? Yesterday I published an article about how the Yahoo! CFO believes that the search engine company is still open to a search deal with Microsoft and today he is no longer CFO. As a matter of fact, he is no longer part of Yahoo! Blake Jorgensen was CFO of Yahoo! since May 2007.
Jorgensen spoke very highly of Yahoo! at yesterday’s Goldman Sachs event. He spoke about how Bartz is taking a very decisive approach with the company.
“Maybe he said something he shouldn’t have said at the conference. Maybe Bartz didn’t care for what he said about her. Maybe this is all part of her big reorganization plan, which was supposed to be announced this week. Maybe he just got another sweet job offer after calling it a day at the conference yesterday. The filing didn’t have those sort of details,” wrote Sam Diaz of ZDNet.
On Saturday, I wrote about how Yahoo! may have a major executive shuffle according to a memo that Bartz sent out. “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie,” stated Bartz in the memo. Some analysts believe that it was foolish to have Blake speak at the event because it led investors to believe that the CFO has big plans in helping the company get back on its feet.
What are your thoughts about Blake? Do you think it was okay for him to speak at an event the day before he quit?
At an investors conference, Yahoo! CFO said today that the search engine company is not opposed to a search deal. BI spotted him making this statement on Bloomberg today. “The deal would have to maximize the unit’s value, Jorgensen said during a presentation today at an investor conference,” stated Jorgensen.
The talks about a search deal with Microsoft reignited when Steve Ballmer stated yesterday that Microsoft was still interested in a deal, but the new Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz ignored discussion requests. I think that the companies should move on and go their separate ways. Each company has their own strategy and business plan, combining them will not take away a lot of Google’s market share for search.
