• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 4, 2012

Yahoo Wednesday confirmed the company is laying off about 2,000 employees as part of a broader effort to reduce costs and create a smaller, more streamlined organization. The embattled Web portal said it expects to realize about $375 million in annual savings from the move and will take most of a pre-tax charge of $125 million to $145 million relating to severance costs in its second quarter.

The blog AllThingsD, which first reported the expected layoff of 2,000 Yahoo workers Tuesday, suggested they could be just the start of wider employee cutbacks. It also indicated the immediate cuts would fall hardest on the company’s product division, led by Blake Irving. Yahoo didn’t provide further detail on those points in its statement Tuesday, which broadly discussed the benefits of the latest restructuring effort.

“Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal," said Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, in the statement.

Thompson, who was named chief executive in January has previously indicated significant changes were ahead for Yahoo but hadn’t laid out details of a turnaround plan for the company. In Tuesday’s statement, he said the company has identified “a select group of core businesses” within Yahoo it will concentrate on without specifying what those areas are.

He also reiterated his intent to capitalize on the company’s wealth of data from its 700 million users to deliver more personalized content and better ROI for advertisers. AllThingsD has reported Thompson, who has hired the Boston Consulting Group, could lay out plans for a company-wide reorganization next week.