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.”
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) yesterday announced the launch of the TSMC-UTokyo Lab to promote advanced semiconductor research, education and talent development. The lab is TSMC’s first laboratory collaboration with a university outside Taiwan, the company said in a statement. The lab would leverage “the extensive knowledge, experience, and creativity” of both institutions, the company said. It is located in the Asano Section of UTokyo’s Hongo, Tokyo, campus and would be managed by UTokyo faculty, guided by directors from UTokyo and TSMC, the company said. TSMC began working with UTokyo in 2019, resulting in 21 research projects,
Ashton Hall’s morning routine involves dunking his head in iced Saratoga Spring Water. For the company that sells the bottled water — Hall’s brand of choice for drinking, brushing his teeth and submerging himself — that is fantastic news. “We’re so thankful to this incredible fitness influencer called Ashton Hall,” Saratoga owner Primo Brands Corp’s CEO Robbert Rietbroek said on an earnings call after Hall’s morning routine video went viral. “He really helped put our brand on the map.” Primo Brands, which was not affiliated with Hall when he made his video, is among the increasing number of companies benefiting from influencer
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) yesterday expressed a downbeat view about the prospects of humanoid robots, given high manufacturing costs and a lack of target customers. Despite rising demand and high expectations for humanoid robots, high research-and-development costs and uncertain profitability remain major concerns, Lam told reporters following the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Taoyuan. “Since it seems a bit unworthy to use such high-cost robots to do household chores, I believe robots designed for specific purposes would be more valuable and present a better business opportunity,” Lam said Instead of investing in humanoid robots, Quanta has opted to invest
RSS