Yahoo Inc’s shares bounced in after-hours trading on Monday as the struggling Internet pioneer topped Wall Street expectations despite a slip in quarterly profit.
Yahoo reported quarterly profits of US$272 million, an 8 percent drop from a year earlier, but the figures were enough to make its stock jump more than 4 percent before dropping back near its regular trading day closing price.
The first full fiscal quarter overseen by chief executive officer Marissa Mayer has seen Yahoo post double-digit revenue gain on ads in online searches, where it was No. 1 before Google Inc surpassed it.
“It’s been an incredibly busy six months,” Mayer said during an earnings call with analysts. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but we are seeing key positive trends.”
Those trends included ebbing attrition of Yahoo employees around the world, better talent competing for jobs and buoyed worker confidence in the future of the California-based company, Mayer said.
For the second consecutive quarter, revenue from ads placed with search results on Yahoo pages has climbed.
Yahoo made a deal with Microsoft Corp in 2009 to have Bing power queries at its online properties, retaining control to personalize results while letting Bing do the “heavy lifting” of indexing and sifting Web content in the background.
The companies have been working to bolster search revenue, which they split under terms of the 10-year contract.
“There is a big push we want to make on search,” said Mayer, who was a high-level engineer at Google before leaving to take the Yahoo helm in July last year.
Last year, Yahoo saw its revenue rise for the first time in four years, Mayer said. The company reported annual revenue of US$4.98 billion for last year, an increase 2 percent from the previous year.
“During the quarter, we made progress by growing our executive team, signing key partnerships, including those with NBC Sports and CBS Television, and launching terrific mobile experiences for Yahoo Mail and Flickr,” Mayer said. “At the same time, we achieved tremendous internal transformation in the culture, energy and execution of the company.”
She expressed anew her intent to tune the company’s popular online properties and services to better connect with smartphones and tablet computers.
The Yahoo CEO said the company will focus on things people want on their smartphones without trying to compete in areas such as hardware and operating systems.
Mayer said the company’s top business challenges this year are to increase use of its properties service, improve its popularity outside of the US and have broader demographic appeal, “in roughly that order of priority.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day