Yahoo Unfazed By Low First Quarter Revenue

Yahoo’s first quarter revenue has come in below expectations, sending the shares down almost five percent on Tuesday.

The Internet giant’s profit grew 36 percent year-on-year, but it wasn’t enough to reassure investors. Yahoo has blamed the underwhelming results on falling display advertising sales and low price-per-click.

CEO Marissa Mayer, who took over the struggling company in July last year, said the numbers were hardly surprising, and the company was going to do better in the next six months.

In January, Yahoo posted its first revenue growth in four years, leading many to hope Mayer may be able to return Yahoo to former glory.

Marissa says relax

Yahoo’s previous boss Scott Thompson was forced to resign in May 2012, after it emerged that he falsely claimed to have a computer science degree in his resume. He was replaced by former Google executive Mayer, who became the company’s eighth CEO in 17 years.

Earlier this year, Mayer revealed that her strategy to reinvent Yahoo would focus on email and mobile apps. This approach seems to be working – according to the CEO, Yahoo added 100 million mobile users in a single quarter.

Overall, the company earned $390 million in the first three months of the year, compared to $286 million in first quarter of 2012.

“Getting the company growing at the rate we like will take several years. Our long-term success will be a series of sprints — we’re nearing the end of our first sprint,” said Mayer during an earnings call.

She explained that the main purpose of the first “sprint” was talent acquisition, and the next will focus on products. Last month, Mayer introduced changes to Yahoo’s hiring policy which mean she now personally reviews every new hire.

Partnership with Microsoft was another hot topic of discussion, with CFO Ken Goldman admitting that there was a “gap in monetization”. The ten-year search deal was signed in 2009 and was supposed to deliver increased revenue and market share. Instead, both Microsoft and Yahoo have been losing market share to Google – a company with which Yahoo signed a more recent advertising deal in February.

Mayer also talked about Summly – a news aggregator developed by a British teenager that was acquired by Yahoo for a reported $30 million: “Summly is a game-changer for Yahoo. It uses a sophisticated set of machine learning and language algorithms to quickly summarize stories.”

“We’re on course to do what we expect to do over the next few years. The 11,300 people who work at Yahoo every day are aligned behind a common goal: to put our users first and to make their daily routines truly delightful,” concluded Mayer.

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