Started from the bottom, now we’re here: Yahoo earns $1.1B in Q2

Yahoo posted quarterly earnings of $1.135 billion today, with GAAP income from operations (operating profit) of $137 million, up 150 percent year-over-year.

Full earnings report is included below.

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The revenue figure represents a seven percent decline year over year from Q2 2012 revenues of $1.2 billion.

GAAP net earnings per diluted share are at $0.30, up 68 percent year-over-year.

$472 million of this year’s revenues came from — what else? — advertising. Display revenue was $472 million for the second quarter of 2013, a 12 percent decrease compared to $535 million for the second quarter of 2012. However, non-display, non-search revenue rose year-over-year from $221.8 million to $245.3 million.

A few months ago, Yahoo handily beat estimates for Q1, bringing in $1.14 billion in revenue for the quarter with earnings per share of $0.35 and overshooting Wall Street’s estimates of $1.1 billion on $0.25 earnings per share.

CEO & stock performance

Yahoo’s stock rose around 12 percent for the quarter, continuing a remarkable comeback trend for the company:

Marissa Mayer also celebrated her first anniversary as Yahoo’s CEO — and she’s arguably been the company’s best CEO to date. Take a look at Yahoo’s first year under Mayer as opposed to the first years of other notable Yahoo chiefs:

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Yahoo’s Q2

Products & design

The company delivered on its promise to focus on mobile with a slew of homegrown and acquired apps: new Weather and Mail apps that impressed with beautiful design and a news app that flooded the screen with full-screen images. The design is, in a word, gorgeous.

That emphasis on design continued with a Yahoo News overhaul, a new look and feel for Yahoo Search’s user interface, and a total reimagination of Flickr, which generated both negative and highly positive feedback among its users.

The company even got into the conversation on wearable tech and is considering options for Google Glass apps.

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Business moves

On the monetary side, Yahoo rolled out new display ad products this past quarter and renewed its Bing-powered search deal with Microsoft.

The company also did some housecleaning, killing off products like AltaVista, RSS Alerts, and Axis.

Acquisitions

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And Mayer led a massive charge in Yahoo’s acquisition activity — much of it pure acqui-hire plays. It bought up to-do app Astrid, video app Qwiki, one-man sports app Bignoggins, and photo app shop GhostBird Software, to name a few.

But Yahoo’s biggest acquisition was without question, Tumblr — a huge $1.1 billion deal in cash. Mayer promised the service, like Flickr, would remain relatively independent from its parent company.

To date, Mayer is responsible for 17 out of the 83 mergers and acquisitions in Yahoo’s history, or more than 20 percent. Overall, this contributed to a year-over-year decline in total assets from $17.1 billion to $16.2 billion.

Broad speculations

Speaking as avid observers, we predict a continued momentum in Yahoo’s corporate turnaround. Morale is high, employees are talented, business moves are solid, and there’s no reason for investors not to be optimistic.

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It’s interesting that we’re starting to think of Yahoo as less of a search portal and more of a company that builds and curates beautiful and interesting products, either in-house or through acquisitions — and that’s enough to keep and build a modern audience of tech-savvy consumers.

Everyone loves a good comeback (we’re still waiting on HP, Dell, Microsoft, and even Zynga for similarly good news), and Yahoo’s decades-long story is shaping up to be exactly that.

Yahoo Q2 2013

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