Yahoo reported a net profit of $390.3 million for the quarter ending March 31, 2013, registering a 36% growth from $286.3 million profit in the same quarter last year. Here are some notes from Yahoo’s Investor conference call:
– Focus Shifts To Product Building: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that they have reaching the end of the first phase, which was getting people to believe in Yahoo and making the company a great place to work. Now their focus is currently on building good products and executing well against their business strategy.
– Personalization Is The Key: Mayer said that personalization would be the main differentiator for Yahoo going forward, both in terms of content and ads and she believes that ads can and should be a part of the user experience. She added that for every content personalization they do, the company is also looking at improving the ad experience for users.
– Acquisitions: Yahoo made two talent acquisitions during the quarter – a nearby place recommendation mobile app Alike and a personalized recommendation company Jybe. It also acquired both the technology and talent of the mobile news aggregation app Summly last month. Summly uses natural language algorithms and machine learning to offer quick news summaries to users. Yesterday, Yahoo debuted a new iOS app, which includes Summly’s technology to provide quick story summaries to users.
Mayer said that Yahoo will continue to look at more acquisitions from talent and product differentiation perspective, which can quickly and easily be integrated to their business.
– New Yahoo Homepage: During the quarter, Yahoo launched a completely revamped Yahoo homepage for web, mobile and tablets. The company claimed that this version offered a more personalized experience to users, with a customizable news feed, infinite scroll and deeper social integration. Mayer claimed that user interaction on the homepage has increased by 25% since the launch and other metrics like time spent, visit frequencies and pageviews have also registered growth during the quarter, however, she didn’t disclose any specific numbers on this.
– 300 Million Monthly Mobile users, Flickr Mobile Uploads Up 50%: Yahoo now has 300 million monthly mobile users, up from 200 million monthly mobile users reported in the previous quarter. During the quarter, Yahoo improved the speed and performance of its products including Yahoo Mail and Flickr. In February, Yahoo released an updated Flickr iOS app, bringing in faster photo uploads, ability to download photos and mention the user’s friends directly from the app. It also rolled out performance and speed improvements to the Yahoo Mail service. Mayer claimed that photo uploads on Flickr mobile apps has increased by more than 50% during the quarter, however she didn’t disclose any specific numbers.
– Partnerships: Yahoo completed two key partnerships during the quarter – a display ad deal with Google and a tie-up with Dropbox, allowing Yahoo Mail users to share and store larger files in attachments. Mayer noted that Yahoo is one of the few companies with significant multi-year partnerships with Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
– APAC Revenues: APAC regions accounted for $186 million of Yahoo’s total revenue, a 5% decline from $196 million revenue in the same quarter last year. Yahoo CFO Kenneth Goldman told that excluding the impact of Korea, the ex-TAC revenues were up by 4% year-on-year (YoY), while the search revenues were up 2% YoY, the display revenues were up 8% YoY and other revenues were up about 4% YoY.
– Repurchasing shares from Alibaba: Yahoo has returned $775 million to shareholders through additional share repurchases, leaving a remainder of around $778 million to be returned of the additional $3 billion capital from the Alibaba sale committed in September 2012.
– Top Talent Attrition Rate Halved: Mayer said that they have rolled out more than 567 employee-focused initiatives till now, including a program which encourages all employees to test and improve their upcoming products. The top talent attrition rate is half of what it was a year ago and 14% of the hires Yahoo made during the quarter were former Yahoo employees. The number of candidates applying to Yahoo has doubled and the resumes received by the company during the quarter has tripled in the past quarter. Yahoo ended the quarter with around 11,300 employees.
Listen – Yahoo Q1 2013 Conference Call
Related: Yahoo Q1 2013: Display Ads Sold Down 7%, Price Per Ad Down 2%; APAC Revenues Down
