Earnings: Mobile Matters To Yahoo — But Not Material Yet

Mobile matters to Yahoo and Terry Semel wants you to know it. It’s one of the three major goals the chairman and CEO focused on during the 4Q06 earnings call — to seize the opportunity in emerging areas — and Yahoo certainly is making progress. The Yahoo One Search deal with Apple for the iPhone is a coup and the expansion of Yahoo Go with the new 2.0 beta is getting some traction. But when will it be material, an analyst asked? Semel didn’t directly answer the question but the answer he did give carried a subtext of “not this year” (my words, not his):
“Look at it, if you will, as we have been for the last year or almost year-and-a-half, I’d say. First, we’re building a big audience … you’ve seen Yahoo products now on more and more and more handsets throughout the world, in some cases tied to either Yahoo Go 2.0 or in other cases, the new Yahoo oneSearch which is becoming very popular. We very much thank iPhone — we think it will be a great advertisement for us in many areas. You have seen Yahoo Mail on many different phones and more and more coming. So we’re really looking at this year with two views, if you will: One view is we’re starting to build a very large audience on a global basis as more and more handsets and more and more companies start taking the Yahoo product on — and they are. On the other hand, we’re starting to learn much more about advertising on mobile. That is precisely why we made the deal in with Vodafone in the U.K. (the U.K., of course, being the largest market in Europe) with us doing more learning here in the U.S. with companies like Opera and others who [we] are starting to work very closely with. So we see this as a year of continuing to build a big audience, take early leadership in that and throughout this year you’ll find us doing a lot of work on advertising pieces and working with other clients to come up with what would be the best answer and the best way to go forward.

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