Yahoo's quarter not the disaster everyone expected
Posted
Jul 22 2008, 04:43 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
It wasn't a pretty quarter, but it wasn't a train wreck. And really, that's all Yahoo could hope for. The company's had a rough ride this year, with the prolonged will-they-or-won't-they acquisition drama with Microsoft. Add to that a difficult environment for online ad sales. And top it all off with an across-the-board lack of confidence in CEO Jerry Yang.
Yahoo didn't have to blow the doors off the quarter. It just had to show that it is still surviving, still able to do business in what could be called its Worst Year Ever. And it did that. Now, to the numbers:
Profit came in at 10 cents a share, excluding some items. That's about what analysts were expecting. But revenue was a slight miss, at $1.35 billion (excluding payments to affiliates). The Street was looking for revenue of about $1.37 billion.
"It looks like a non-event," a Collins Stewart analyst told MarketWatch. "It was a bad quarter, but it was also expected."
The stock is up 1% in after-hours trading to $21.62.
