Rose Tsou won’t outright admit that she’s a perfectionist, but she will tell you that 99 per cent isn’t good enough.
Tsou, Yahoo’s head of Asia - and the lady charged with overseeing its presence in key markets Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan - is recounting her early days at the company. In 2000, when she was managing director of Yahoo Taiwan, the site had roughly 70 per cent reach. As a new manager who “loves a challenge”, she guided Yahoo through its acquisition of Kimo, a portal that was the most visited site in the market at the time, according to ACNielsen, and helped Yahoo’s Taiwanese reach rocket to 99 per cent at one point. “I almost wanted to make a call to that last one per cent,” she laughs.
Tsou, Yahoo’s head of Asia - and the lady charged with overseeing its presence in key markets Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan - is recounting her early days at the company. In 2000, when she was managing director of Yahoo Taiwan, the site had roughly 70 per cent reach. As a new manager who “loves a challenge”, she guided Yahoo through its acquisition of Kimo, a portal that was the most visited site in the market at the time, according to ACNielsen, and helped Yahoo’s Taiwanese reach rocket to 99 per cent at one point. “I almost wanted to make a call to that last one per cent,” she laughs.
The deal transformed Yahoo’s financial performance in the market too. When she joined Yahoo Taiwan, “revenue was less than US$3 million” and when she left to assume a regional position, “it was hundreds of millions”.
Tsou’s career stands out for sheer variety. She has held executive positions at Procter & Gamble (P&G), MTV and Warner Music; she has held a recording contract with Warner Music; she has even in her time landed a ‘popular girl’ cheerleading gig in high school.
A pattern can be found when Tsou describes her resume: she enters a company, achieves her own predetermined goal and then departs once her job is complete. Veni, vidi, vici.
“I like change. I’m so afraid of being bored,” she asserts. “For example, at P&G, for marketing, it’s like the holy place you’ve got to be. But it wasn’t the right place for me - I wanted an environment without so many rules. I think you don’t have to limit yourself; the world is out there to explore.”
Tsou may still swear by this mantra, but is her decade-long tenure at Yahoo proof that her wanderlust has finally been sated? According to Tsou, the changing nature of the digital landscape keeps her captivated, and in her role as head of Asia, she has overseen high-end partnership deals with the likes of Alibaba Group, Softbank and Seven Network in China, Japan and Australia, making Yahoo’s operations in these key markets hugely different tasks.
“There’s so much still to conquer at Yahoo,” she says, noting that when she feels she is just about to master on aspect of the job, something else comes along. “A lot of the competitors we face didn’t even exist three years ago - that alone makes it interesting.”
And in terms of “interesting”, Tsou says the past 20 months have been the most tumultuous she has known. First there was the on-off ‘Microhoo’ saga. Then co-founder Jerry Yang departed, followed by the entrance of president/CEO Carol Bartz, who Tsou says has revitalised the company. Under Bartz, a search marketing deal with Microsoft was finally struck, though it cannot be finalised without approval from several global governments.
On a more local level, China Yahoo has been a fixture in the news. In August, Alibaba Group - China Yahoo’s majority shareholder since 2005 - was accused of shifting resources out of Yahoo and into its own Taobao platform, moving the classified service Koubei.com to its auction site. In the aftermath of that announcement, nearly 100 Beijing-based employees of China Yahoo reportedly resigned after facing the decision to relocate to Hangzhou or accept redundancy.
China Yahoo also announced that it will end operation of its Yahoo Guanxi social networking site this month, approximately one year after it launched, and in September, Yahoo sold its 1.9 per cent stake in Alibaba.com, a move that drew more comment on the nature of the relationship between the two companies.
Of the news, Tsou merely says that “Alibaba is our China strategy”, and affirms that the two digital powerhouses will remain partnered for the foreseeable future.
“Yahoo used to operate in China for a number of years before we entered this partnership with Alibaba about four-and-a-half years ago so we also understand that’s a pretty challenging market to compete in,” she says, noting cultural and governmental hurdles that make operations a challenge. “Over the years Yahoo learned that our best way to win in that market is to operate through local people. You need to have the local talents that know how to operate China and really know how to make an investment into China to make it work.”
But others aren’t as confident. “Alibaba seems to have zero interest in maintaining and developing the Yahoo brand as it would seem to drive against its own strategic direction,” CEO of search marketing for GroupM Robbie Hills recently told Media. Several industry sources question whether the strategy to compete in search and portals is working out.
To criticism like this, Tsou says Yahoo has faith in Alibaba Group, and with its ability to steer its own assets in the market, she feels confident it will do its best to maintain the Yahoo franchise.
She also adds that these pressures are part of the job, and much of her role’s appeal comes from the ongoing challenge.
A step in the right direction is Yahoo’s newly launched $100 million brand campaign, which is set to launch in Asia in the coming months. Tsou hopes the campaign will put Yahoo back at the forefront of audiences’ digital activities. “In the past 20 months, Yahoo was distracted by so many external events. And now there’s a feeling that Yahoo has been liberated and we can accomplish more. Now, we’re very focused on our own game and we’re not defined by our competition,” she says.
“But there’s no magic that keeps me driven to provide good leadership at the company,” she continues. “I just keep going back and make people love Yahoo.”
Rose Tsou’s CV
2007 Senior VP, Yahoo Asia
2000 General manager, Yahoo Taiwan
2000 General manager, MTV Taiwan, Taiwan
1997 Marketing director, MTV ASia, Singapore
1995 Marketing manager, MTV Taiwan, Taipei, Taiwan
1994 Marketing manager, Warner Music Taipei, Taiwan
1993 Assistant brand manager, Max Factor, Proctor & Gamble, Taiwan
1989 Account manager, Ogilvy & Mather, Taiwan
This article was originally published in 8 October 2009 issue of Media.
