Struggling Yahoo today announced a strategic plan to simplify the company, narrowing its focus on areas of strength to better fuel growth, drive revenue and increase efficiency in 2016 and beyond. Let's start with some financial figures announced by Yahoo.

The company on Tuesday reported a 15 percent fall in adjusted quarterly revenue as it struggles to keep its share of online search and display advertising in the face of tough competition from Facebook and Google.

Yahoo's revenue - after deducting fees paid to partner websites - fell to $1.00 billion in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31 from $1.18 billion a year earlier.

The company reported a loss of $4.43 billion, or $4.70 per share, in the quarter compared with a net income of $166.3 million, or 17 cents per share, a year earlier.

First of all, Yahoo is exploring strategic alternatives in addition to the continued pursuit of the reverse spin-off of its Internet business. Yahoo's turnaround plan aims to:

• Improve consumer and advertiser product quality and grow daily active users (DAUs)
• Drive continued growth in revenue realized through Mavens (mobile, video, native and social) to $1.8 billion this year,
• Improve profitability to reach an adjusted EBITDA run rate of approximately one billion dollars by the second half of 2016
• Reduce operating expenses by more than $400 million by the end of 2016
• Limit GAAP revenue impact of product and regional exits to approximately $100 million
• Explore non-strategic asset divestitures that, if consummated, could generate in excess of $1 billion in cash, and
• Deliver increased value to shareholders, advertisers, and the more than one billion people who use Yahoo's products and services.

"Today, we're announcing a strategic plan that we strongly believe will enable us to accelerate Yahoo's transformation," said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo. "This is a strong plan calling for bold shifts in products and in resources. We are extremely proud of the billion dollar plus business we have built in mobile, video, native, and social. Our strategic bets in Mavens have enabled us build an entirely new, forward-leaning business of tremendous scale and growth in just three years. The plan announced today builds from that achievement and will dramatically brighten our future and improve our competitiveness, and attractiveness to users, advertisers, and partners."

Yahoo has grown into a guide to digital information discovery for more than one billion monthly active users. In 2016, the company will prioritize growing engagement with its user base. Yahoo will simplify its product portfolio to emphasize the products that distinguish the company and drive the most substantial portion of users, revenue, and market opportunity.

For consumer products, Yahoo will consist of three global platforms: Search, Mail, and Tumblr, and four verticals: News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle in growth markets like the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. For advertisers, Yahoo will be defined by two core offerings: Gemini and BrightRoll. Gemini combines search and native ads for superior results, while BrightRoll offers programmatic buying and selling tools for video, display and native advertising.

For Yahoo's search business, mobile search is the biggest opportunity. The company will shift most of the resources in this area toward more forward-leaning mobile search investments, positioning it to redefine search for mobile devices.

Yahoo Mail is the heart of the ompany's communications products. To continue to grow DAUs and increase engagement, investment in Yahoo Mail will be used to improve speed and stability, as well as add features that make it easier for users to share, search and connect through the platform.

For the Tumblr platform and Yahoo's digital content strongholds of News, Sports, Finance, and Lifestyle, investment will be focused on growing user engagement, especially on mobile. The company will invest in features that engage users as both consumers and creators of content, encouraging them to do more with, and therefore spend more time on, the Yahoo network.

Yahoo will continue to invest in the Mavens strategy to counterbalance legacy business declines with an emphasis on mobile. Mavens revenue exceeded $1.6 billion in GAAP revenue in 2015, a 45 percent year-over-year increase. Focus on engagement growth and improved monetization for the core consumer products, together with the syndication of mobile tools through the Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite, Yahoo expects to drive long-term sustainable revenue growth and reach more than $1.8 billion in Mavens GAAP revenue in 2016.

Mobile industry ad spend is anticipated to nearly double by 2018, and programmatic technology has become the proven advertising solution for optimal performance, pricing and control. In response to these trends, Yahoo's global sales team has already begun to shift toward performance and programmatic offerings and the company has already seen the benefits of this in Q4.

Yahoo says that a smaller product portfolio emphasizing Yahoo's core strengths will yield better focus, execution, and ultimately clearer value to shareholders, advertisers and users. In Q4 the company closed Yahoo Screen and shifted away from original scripted content. In 2016, Yahoo will consolidate some Digital Magazines under one of its four core verticals, while others will be shut down. The company will also exit legacy products, including Games and Smart TV, which have not met growth expectations.

In addition to a clarified product portfolio, Yahoo has begun to explore divesting non-strategic assets of value such as the responsible monetization of non-strategic patents, the sale of real estate, and other non-core, non-strategic assets. Through the end of the year, the company estimates that these efforts could generate between one and three billion dollars in cash.

The company has begun executing on a number of additional cost-savings efforts. Since 2012, Yahoo has already made significant strides to manage headcount and achieve stability with fewer employees. Yahoo plans to reduce our workforce by roughly 15 percent and exit five offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Milan, subject to local laws and consultation processes. It's expected that most of these changes will take place in Q1, but by the end of 2016, the company anticipates having approximately 9,000 employees and fewer than 1,000 contractors. This will result in savings in short term operating expense of $400 million annually.

As a result of this four-point plan, Yahoo expects to return to modest and accelerating growth in 2017 and 2018.