Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) Beats Earnings Expectations, But Shares Dive

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Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) released its fourth quarter earnings report, reporting revenue of $1.27 billion in revenue and earnings of 46 cents per share. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, Yahoo’s revenue was $1.2 billion for the quarter. GAAP revenue was $4.68 billion for the full year. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, revenue was $4.426 billion for the full year. Net earnings were reported to be 33 cents per share for the most recently completed quarter, excluding a gain from the sale of some of the company’s patents.

Analysts had been expecting the search giant to report revenue of $1.2 billion and earnings of 38 cents per share for the December quarter. Shares of Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) fell as much as 5% in after-hours trading after the results were announced, probably because of concerns about the company’s declining core display ad business.

Breaking down Yahoo’s results

Looking more closely at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)’s results, the company reported GAAP display revenue of $553 million, which is a 6% decrease from the same quarter a year ago. The company reported GAAP display revenue of $1.95 billion for the full year—a 9% year over year decrease. Display revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs was $491 million for the December quarter and $1.737 billion for the full year, once again, both year over year declines. The company increased the number of ads sold, excluding Korea, by 3% year over year in the December quarter. However, the price per ad fell about 7%.

GAAP search revenue was $464 million for the quarter and $1.742 billion for the full year. Excluding TAC, it was $461 million for the quarter and $1.699 billion for the full year. Paid clicks, excluding Korea, rose 17% year over year for the quarter, although price per click fell 3%.

Yahoo provides business highlights

During the December quarter, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) kept launching new products and improving its Web presence. It launched a better Yahoo Finance across the Web, mobile and tablets and rolled out major updates to Yahoo Mail. The company also extended Yahoo Screen to Apple TV, launched Flickr’s photo books and expanded Yahoo Weather to the iPad.

Also during the quarter, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) acquired Aviate (ThumbsUp Labs, PeerCDN (Instant IO), Evntlive, Ptch, SkyPhrase, LookFlow, Bread Labs and Hitpost. In addition, it brought some key executives on board, including David Pogue to head up consumer tech coverage and Matt Bai as national political columnist. Both had been with The New York Times. Katie Couric also signed on with Yahoo as the company’s Global Anchor this month.

 

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