Yahoo's Fourth Quarter Financial Results Manage to Meet the Low Expectations

Yahoo has released its fourth quarter financial results. They're not that bad, but that's considering that this is Yahoo. The company declined in both revenue and income numbers from the same period in the previous year. This happens while everyone else making money from ads is seeing growth.

The slightly good news is that Yahoo managed to meet Wall Street expectations. The slightly bad news is that those expectations were rather low.

Revenue, sans traffic acquisition costs (TAC), was $1.169 billion, €898 million in Q4 2011, a three percent dip from Q4 2010. Operating income was $242 million, €186 up 10 percent from $220 million, €169 in the same period in 2010.

However, net income was $296 million, €227 million down five percent from $312 million, €240 million in Q4 2010.

For the full year, Yahoo revenue, ex-TAC, was $4.381 billion, €3.367 billion, five percent down compared to 2010 numbers.

"Yahoo! continued to make progress in the quarter with operating income increasing ten percent year over year," Scott Thompson, Yahoo's CEO for the past two weeks or so, said.

"In 2012 we will be aligning resources behind key areas of focus to enable us to move aggressively in market and grow our business, bringing innovative new products and experiences to both our users and advertisers," he added.

Considering that during this quarter, Yahoo's fate was in the balance and that the company operated without a proper CEO, it could have been worse.

Yahoo's new CEO has some ideas for turning things around, but it's too early to reveal them. He will focus on getting ad sales up, an obvious priority for the company. He also plans to fix the whole mess with Yahoo's Asian properties. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.

He also plans to focus a bit more on the technology part, through acquisitions if he has to. Coming from a tech-focused CEO, that's hardly surprising and it may be what Yahoo needs, but don't get your hopes too high about things changing that much on this front.