Yahoo Tops Q4 Goals

The earnings season starts with Yahoo, literally… Yahoo turned in its ninth consecutive profitable quarter and announced that sales nearly doubled in the holiday quarter. Bu the Street’s still not satisfied…

Profit in Q4, ’03: $75 million, up from $46.2 million in the year-ago quarter. Yahoo said its revenue under GAAP reached $663.9 million this quarter, compared with $285.8 million for the same period in 2002…

For the whole year, marketing services, which include paid-search or sponsored listings and branded advertising, was $1.19 billion, or 73 percent of Yahoo’s total revenue.

Conference call details: Yahoo expects to end 2004 with 7 to 7.5 million in paid relationships, up from 4.9 million in 2004 and 2.2 million in 2003. The bulk of those paying relationships come from access fees Yahoo generates by providing content and services to SBC Communications (SBC: news, chart, profile) subscribers. Decker said Yahoo expects those paying relationships to be generating about $3 to $5 a month.

Yahoo also plans on creating more partnerships this year to enable Yahoo users to access Yahoo content on handheld devices or home networks.

BusinessWeek: Though Terry Semel may try to spin it as a more diversified company, the portal’s robust earnings are the result of a robust ad market

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