elaineHenrique de Castro, Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo Inc. has been fired and left the company yesterday without any explanation by the company offered to the public.
According to the news article on Reuters, de Castro was fired by Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, but no comments have been released from the company as to the reasons behind Mayer’s decision which she included in a “blunt memo” issued to the staff at Yahoo.
“During my own reflection, I made the difficult decision that our COO, Henrique de Castro, should leave the company,” Mayer wrote in the memo.
De Castro was snatched from Google by Mayer only a year ago when she was building a management team in the effort to revive waning sales and traffic and re-inspire confidence in the company.
De Castro was an advertising expert every company wanted to have, so Yahoo awarded him with a compensation package totalling $58 million when he was hired.
However, it soon became clear that de Castro was no miracle worker, despite his tough talk and strong personality, as Yahoo’s revenue growth remained unchanged and has seen a steady decline between 5 and 7% year-over-year in each of the first three quarters of 2013.
The steady decline in revenue is mostly due to the online presence of fierce competitors such as Facebook Inc. and Google, even though Yahoo is one of the most visited online properties in the world.
De Castro has not commented his departure from the company, but sources claim that he will get his severance benefits that have been laid out in his employment letter of October 15th, 2012.
Mayer is currently focused on the senior leadership team that she has built and is in the middle of planning a turnaround at the company that once, not so long ago, dominated the Web.