“And when you’re up, you’re up,
and when you’re down you’re down,
and when you’re only half-way up,
you’re neither up nor down”.
- The Grand Old Duke of York, nursery rhyme c. 1793
Yahoo! has released Q1 2008 numbers in advance of it’s investors’ conference call which starts in about ten minutes. The report shows that Yahoo! made slightly more money in the past three months than it did in the similar quarter of 2007, but not much more. The report also shows that Yahoo!’s earnings are down slightly from the last reported quarter, Q4 2007.
Yahoo! reports revenues of $1.352billion in Q1-08, a $169million or 14% improvement over the same period last year. While still proving growth in billable services such as paid search advertising and display advertising, Yahoo!’s growth comes at a slower pace than that of rival Google. Still, a 14% increase is likely higher than expected by investors and certainly higher than anticipated by the search marketing community.
That wasn’t enough to improve the net-income per share projections which have hovered around the twelve cent mark for the past year. In fact, Yahoo!’s income-per-share declined by two cents per share from Q4-07 to $0.11/share, the same return offered in Q1-07.
One thing that continues to grow year over year is Yahoo!’s official headcount. Even after the layoffs earlier this year, Yahoo! ends Q1-08 with a headcount of 13,800 employees, down only 500 people from it’s all-time peak of 14,300 at the end of Q4-07.
The company’s short-term outlook remains the same with 2008 revenues projected to fall between $7.2Billion and $8Billion.
The conference call is just beginning and Jerry Yang and Susan Decker are about to take the stage.
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