Yahoo to exit from Chinese mainland market

The Yahoo logo is shown at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California in this file photo taken on April 16, 2013. [Photo/Agencies]

Yahoo's decision to shut the office in Beijing could mean that the company is planning to leave the country for good.

"It will be difficult for Yahoo to make a comeback in China once the operations are scaled down to this extent. Even if it develops a new strategy, it will take almost a decade to even reach 5 or 10 percent share in the Internet space," said Shah.

In 2013, Yahoo shut down its mail service and Web portal in China and transferred its customers' accounts to Alibaba Group's Alimail. The R&D facility, founded in 2009, was the only remaining company office in the Chinese mainland.

The center mainly focused on advertising, cloud computing and other personal Internet tools and technologies.

Laid off, but it won't be for long

Engineers who are being laid off by Yahoo Inc are already being courted by talent-starved Internet companies in China.

Big names such as Baidu Inc and JD.com Inc and small startups have sent out feelers to some of the engineers from Yahoo's soon-to-be-closed Beijing research and development center. In response, lagou.com, a website that matches employees and employers in the burgeoning domestic Internet sector, has already arranged face-to-face meetings.

More than 20 companies and about 30 Yahoo employees showed up to a quickly arranged job fair in Beijing.

Ma Delong, chief executive officer of lagou.com, said it is safe to say that the 200 or so people from Yahoo's Beijing R&D center will not satisfy the demand of Chinese Internet employers.

"Yahoo's reputation attracts these would-be employers. And the booming development of the nation's Internet companies and the wave of Internet entrepreneurship here have created the thirst for Internet talent."

He said that the number of university graduates in Internet-related majors is far short of demand. "The data from our site showed that in some hot areas of expertise, there are two to three openings per employee," he said.

The number of people who work in the Internet sector is expected to double to 10 million in the next three years as e-commerce booms and transforms traditional companies, Ma said.