Yahoo!'s earnings call on Oct. 21 highlighted improvements in the company's mobile business. CEO Marissa Mayer also placed emphasis on the benefits and the billions of dollars the company reaped from various acquisitions and buybacks.
The Sunnyvale company reported a net income of $6.8 billion, which is far from the $297 million that it earned a year earlier.
Most of the company's profit boost came after Alibaba's IPO; Yahoo! sold its stake in the Chinese-owned company. With 43 cents as its earnings per share, Yahoo! was able to beat analysts' estimates. Current record shows that sales went flat at $1.1 billion.
"We had a good, solid third quarter. We delivered $1.094 billion in revenue ex-TAC and $1.148 billion in GAAP revenue," Mayer said. "This represents 1 percent growth in revenue ex-TAC and 1 percent growth in GAAP revenue."
Mayer added that the company's revenue growth was achieved in investment areas such as social, video and mobile.
For the first time, mobile contributed significantly to the third quarter earnings results. Mayer told investors that revenue from mobile went beyond $200 million for the quarter and it's expected to top $1.2 billion for the full year. Moreover, Yahoo!'s acquisition of Tumblr has produced impressive results during the quarter after noting that mobile device use had reached 550 million monthly active users, an increase of 17 percent from 2013.
"We have invested deeply in mobile and we are seeing those investments pay off. Not only are our mobile products attracting praise and engagement from users and industry awards; they are generating meaningful revenue for Yahoo!," said Mayer.
While the company has reported impressive results, it still needs to work harder in order to catch up with Facebook and Google, which continue to dominate the world of digital advertising. In 2010, Yahoo! was the leader in this industry. Now, its market share is said to be roughly 6 percent.
eMarketer, a research company, speculates that Yahoo!'s global market share for 2014 will drop to 2.4 percent compared to 2.9 percent in 2013. If that's the case, it would cause the company's ranking to drop to fourth place.
Mayer gave out few concrete details on the company's acquisition strategy. However, she said that major acquisitions would be limited since the company is putting more emphasis on "building block acquisitions" in a move to enhance Yahoo!'s often outdated technology.
