Yahoo has reported financial growth this quarter

Oct 22, 2014 08:33 GMT  ·  By
Marissa Mayer plans to keep on going as earnings report proves her methods are working
   Marissa Mayer plans to keep on going as earnings report proves her methods are working

Marissa Mayer is defending her actions over the past couple of years since she took the reins of Yahoo, and luckily for her, she had a good earnings report to back her up.

Even though the growth wasn’t that spectacular, it was still more than it has managed to obtain in the past few quarters.

“We had a good, solid third quarter. We delivered $1.094 billion (€861 million) in revenue ex-TAC and $1.148 (€904 million) in GAAP revenue. This represents 1% growth in revenue ex-TAC and 1% growth in GAAP revenue. We achieved this revenue growth through strong growth in our new areas of investment – mobile, social, native and video – despite industry headwinds in some of our large, legacy businesses,” Mayer said, making a tight correlation between her shopping spree in the startup community and the new, improved, results.

Now that Yahoo has reported some growth, Mayer is showing even more confidence that she’s on the right path in leading the company, even though she spent $1.6 billion (€1.26 billion) on acquisitions in the past two years. Truth be told, however, Yahoo may have spent all that money on purchases, but $1.1 billion (€866 million) of it all went to Tumblr, the blogging platform that’s so loved among youngsters. Another $300 million (€236.3 million) went to Flurry, a mobile analytics company.

Mayer argues that all the acquisitions she made have brought in talent that is now essential to Yahoo’s future and to the technologies the company is interested in, especially concerning those four pillars Mayer mentioned – communications, search, digital magazines and video.

Yahoo has been heavily criticized recently for Mayer’s desire to purchase startups for tens of millions just so she could get her hands on the engineers in the company. The fact that all these apps these people have worked on have vanished has rubbed people the wrong way.

Critics have told Yahoo to just sell the Alibaba shares and sell out to AOL because the strategies being adopted weren’t paying off.

“We are pleased with our performance this quarter, demonstrating results that met or exceeded guidance on key metrics. We ended the quarter with over $12 billion (€9.45 billion) in cash and marketable securities following the sale of 140 million shares of Alibaba stock in the IPO, which resulted in $9.4 billion in pre-tax proceeds. In Q3 and Q4 to date, we have bought back approximately $1.6 billion (€1.26 billion) of our stock. Of this amount, we have returned $1.4 billion (€1.1 billion) to shareholders as a part of our commitment to return at least half of the after-tax IPO proceeds. We are hopeful that we will finish the year strong, and we believe that the Company is well positioned for improved performance in 2015,” said Ken Goldman, chief financial officer of Yahoo.