Boston, MA 10/16/2013 (wallstreetpr) – All eyes were on Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) CEO and the effects of her turnaround strategy when Yahoo! announced its3Q2013 earnings yesterday. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has been trying to turnaround the long struggling company since some time. The company declared earnings per share of $0.34 on revenues of $1.1 billion against earnings of $0.35 per share and revenues of $1.1 billion for the same period last year. The earnings were better than the analysts’ expectation of $0.33 per share, and the revenues matched the expectations. Marissa has embarked on a string of acquisitions, picking up more than 20 companies like Rockmelt, Xobni, Summly, and Tumblr. This has added a good amount of highly talented human resources professionals to the company. Marissa identified people, products, traffic and revenues as a chain dependent on each other. She said “Great teams build beautiful engaging products, those products drive increased traffic. The increased traffic generates greater advertiser interest, which ultimately results in revenue growth.” The traffic has shown signs of increase; Yahoo! attracted 800 million monthly active users (MAUs) a growth of 20% over July 2012. Bulk of the traffic is also coming from mobiles – 350 million MAUs come from mobile gadgets. The ad revenues are still falling and considering that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Twitter Inc, and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) are enjoying growing ad revenues that are a serious cause of concern.
Yahoo! has scored with its investment in Alibaba.com Ltd. (HKG:1688). Yahoo! owns 23% of the Chinese internet company. Alibaba is expected to launch its own IPO valued at $70 billion. With its share in Alibaba, Yahoo! will be flush with cash as it will have to sell out its share. Even at the issue price, Yahoo! is expected to earn at least $17 billion in cash. Investors are looking forward to the acquisition of new companies to shore up its falling ad revenues or a generous buyback. Yahoo’s shares have appreciated by 70% since January and were at $33.38 at the close of the market on October 15, 2013.
