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This is true, but organisational wise the Asian Yahoo! divisions are not wholly owned by Yahoo! as we know it. Yahoo! Japan for instance is a separately listed company part owned by Softbank. A friend of mine went for an interview at yahoo japan and was told "we don't have much to do with yahoo america so you'll never be sent to work there".

But you're right, it seems like an obvious strength to capitalize on.

I was going to say the same thing. I had a girlfriend from Taiwan studying in Australia who used Yahoo for most of the things she did online (email, search, shopping) and said most of her friends did too. This was in 2007 so things might have changed since then but even in 2007 most westerners thought Yahoo was dead and no one used it.

I have a girlfriend from Singapore and she is still using Yahoo extensively. Plus I discussed search engines with my Japanese teacher and few Asian students and most of them considered Yahoo the most popular website on the Internet.

Interesting, maybe they should have promoted the Asian division head to CEO...

search engine wise, it uses Bing.