Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo First Quarter Results: Revenue Dips Slightly, Profits Increase
New submitter dolilmao was the first with the news of Yahoo's first quarter results. From Techcrunch: "Yahoo just released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2013, with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share. Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was flat compared to last year, at $1.07 billion. Analysts has predicted that the company would report revenue of $1.1 billion and 24 cents EPS. Wall Street normally evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis — including traffic acquisition costs, revenue was $1.14 billion, down 7 percent from last year."
So much money for no actual contribution to the internet I can think of... at least with google you get some useful services.
What time since ~2000 has Yahoo been a relevant technology company?
If revenue is down, but profits are up, I'm betting a bunch of the long-term employees were fired, as they were the most expensive. While this will help Yahoo's short-term outlook, a few years down the road will be really bad for them.
.
Best to have real results that actually do follow GAAP. Those numbers would have to follow certain guidelines of Standard Accounting Practice : Standard accounting practices require publicly traded companies to follow certain accounting rules when presenting financial statements so that the readers of the statements can easily compare different companies. Private companies are also often required by banks and shareholders, for example, to present information according to their specified rules. [emphasis from wikipedia article, not my bold-facing here
So instead of standard practices dictated by SEC rules, they sprinkled some fairy-dust and powdered-unicorn horns and some shredded nauga-hide on their statements and came up with a magical "with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share". La-de-da-di-do! Magic. Get back to me with some real numbers like you're supposed to do as a publicly traded company. Isn't this somehow against SEC regulations? Jus' wonderin'...
Wall Street normally evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis — including traffic acquisition costs,
TAC is Traffic Acquisition Cost.
"ex-TAC basis — including traffic acquisition costs," makes no damn sense to me. They are evaluating Yahoo! ex Traffic Cost basis and including it back in? So, they're going to subtract one and add 1 back in?
But hey, we're talking Wall Street here. It's not like they value companies and their earnings like normal business people.
Watch out for the MBAs and the CFAs. And if someone has both, they are the spawn of Satan and run away! They are a true Master of Lies!!
If you scan through the Income statement, and look through its operating expenses the big change is a decrease in "Traffic Acquisition Cost" which explains most of the decrease in expenses about 80% of it (and the decrease in revenue too). It looks like they cut back on deals that were costing more than the revenue they were getting (or focuses on more profitable traffic etc).
For a while anyway!
It buys other companies to graft onto itself to give its corpse the semblance of life...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Read the article.
GAAP revenue of 186 million, earnings per share $0.35
They're just trying to put on the best show.
The comparison was based on the previous year's non-GAAP.
Everything to keep the SEC happy!
But also amazing Slashdot rarely gets Insiders to set records straight.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
However, Non-GAAP is a fishy way to begin anything. Sure, a few things might go unscathed, but those rules got there for a few reasons, so companies going all fancy must have something in mind.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hey guys, I did my own non-GAAP numbers for my income, and I made a net profit of $23 billion dollars last year! And I can prove it, I used Enron's old accountants to do it!
Non-GAAP means nothing. GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principals. You're only allowed to report taxes/earnings etc using GAAP. Using GAAP means you followed the rules, and conversely non-GAAP quite literally means you ignored all of the rules and made up your own. Really.
To put it another way, GAAP is to professional accountants as ITEF's RFC is to networking engineers.
Always ignore non-GAAP numbers, because it's how marketing drones convince dumb journalists (or worse, Slashdot editors) to publish fake, reverse FUD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_accepted_accounting_principles
Always wait for the quarterly earnings report, THAT is required by law to use GAAP.
moox. for a new generation.
But that would entail making improvements.
I haven't seen any since 2006.
they sprinkled some fairy-dust and powdered-unicorn horns and some shredded nauga-hide on their statements and came up with a magical "with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share".
I don't think your not being fair to Yahoo, many (most) companies resort to "window dressing" to make figures look more attractive, but GAAP is more useful for *comparing companies* (but poor at comparing itself...to itself). In this instance the non-GAAP results discount gains and losses that aren't really part of their core business (and stock based compensation expense). In fact Google did the same last quarter...it took out things like 500Million one off restructuring of Motorola, because it makes no sense as a metric when comparing itself to prior (and future) financial statements.
Amazing what you can do when you cut out huge chunks of your work force, eh?
That site still exists? I quit using them completely when they broke their website by deciding Web 2.0 and popup menus were the rave. One of these days successful companies will "recall" what made them successful, and quit trying to make their successes seem like failures by completely abandoning their focus and user base.
Yahoo, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, need I continue?
Hey guys, I did my own non-GAAP numbers for my income, and I made a net profit of $23 billion dollars last year! And I can prove it, I used Enron's old accountants to do it!
To quote "Non-GAAP Net earnings is defined as Net earnings excluding certain gains, losses, expenses, and their related tax effects, that we do not believe are indicative of our ongoing results and further adjusted to exclude stock based compensation expense and its related tax effects.
Non-GAAP Operating income is defined as Income from operations excluding certain gains, losses, and expenses that we do not believe are indicative of our ongoing operating results and further adjusted to exclude stock based compensation expense.
Non-GAAP Total operating expenses is defined as GAAP Total operating expenses excluding TAC and certain other expenses that we do not believe are indicative of our ongoing operating expenses and further adjusted to exclude stock - based compensation expense" http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/YHOO/2426873689x0x653799/c2ef68a1-49db-4bad-8e44-1f4f75bc81d4/YHOO_Q113EarningsPresentationFINAL.pdf
It is what it says it is; a way of *comparing* like with like around the core business. Is Motorola's restructuring costs a sensible way of measuring Googles search business? How about nokia selling off its HQ anything to so with its smartphones? How about Microsoft paying of the EU routine thing?
If you are looking at performance measures...you compare like for like otherwise its simply stupid, which is why unusual of non-business relates expenses/income should be ignored.
Yahoo needs to succeed - Google needs competition, especially since it owns so much internet real estate. Put another way, users need alternatives to Google so that it doesn't become a single, monolithic central clearing house for just about everything you do in your life.
Yahoo is dead. Long dead. Didn't anyone tell them yet?
Yahoo could have been any number of big names we have today.
Instead they tried to be everything to everybody and failed totally at being anything to anybody.
Even their search was a joke. Page jam full of everything you could never want from a search engine in one place.
One of the dead 'metoo' companies.. You've got what? Oh we have that! metoo! And did such a terrible job on all of it.
They're dead! On the cart with em!
better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share.
Oh, so it's cool to treat non GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) as hard facts now? Awesome, then I'm declaring $5 billion in earnings this day alone. See? I wrote $5 billion on this post-it note, so it must be true! I'll wait until Yahoo releases the numbers that came from actual accounting work, and not the CEO playing around in excel.
Yahoo went dead the moment they appointed a clueless Hollywood hack Terry Semel as CEO. He should not be hired to run even a grocery store. Then they acquired broadcast.com (I still don't know what the hell that website/service performed) which made a few insiders insanely rich. The new acquisition of the news reading app by Marissa Mayer shows the old culture is still intact. Jerry Yang and David Filo are overrated...they are not Sergey Brin or Larry Page.
(Generally people are aware of public sector corruption, but private sector all over the world is equally corrupt.)
Marissa Mayer made a huge miscalculation by taking the Yahoo CEO position. This is like Sarah Palin running against Obama. Palin is clever. Marissa Mayer is not.
Tat Tvam Asi
...for not begging MS to buy them now. Jerry was a retard in not taking the offer back when MS wanted to throw money at them.
The Percentage of yahoo earning is very high, yahoo mail is reliable and does not always have outdages due to their Htaccess security, i think this contribute to their financial success on this day.