Just one day from her one-year anniversary as CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer delivered second-quarter earnings that beat analyst expectations and proved she’s increasing end user engagement with the company’s mobile products.
Under Mayer, Yahoo has been aggressively streamlining its mobile efforts, eliminating excess products and improving those that see the most traffic. In an earnings call Tuesday, Mayer said that the launch of the company’s redesigned Yahoo! app for iOS and Android has resulted in a 55 percent increase in daily active users and a 60 percent increase in time spent using the application.
Along with improving many of its mobile products, Yahoo! has also been working to integrate its recent acquisitions such as Summly, which summarizes pieces of content for better display on a mobile device.
“With aggressive hiring and strategic acquisitions we have grown our dedicated mobile team by a factor of six in the past 12 months,” Mayer said. “We’ve gone from having dozens of engineers to now having hundreds of engineers dedicated to mobile. In Q2 alone we closed a number of key acquisitions, including Summly, Astrid, Go Poll Go, Milewise, Loki Studios, Rondee, Ghostbird Software, PlayerScale, and of course Tumblr.”
Ken Goldman, Yahoo!’s chief financial officer, acknowledged that most of the company’s acquisitions over the past year have been relatively small mobile-oriented companies.
“Most of the acquisitions have been related to the mobile area and in most cases it’s really in lieu of our own hiring that we’ve acquired these companies not necessarily for revenue but really for talent and expertise,” Goldman said.
Mayer gave Yahoo an “A” for its progress in mobile over the past year. She said that when she took over, the company was “severely underinvested” in mobile and was delivering “fragmented and unfocused” products.
“We invested heavily and we are seeing incredible growth as a result,” Mayer said, noting that Yahoo! recently surpassed 340 million monthly mobile users. “Mobile is a strong growth driver. And with the right mobile ad units, we believe that mobile will be a large revenue driver. Yahoo!’s future is mobile and we are delivering our products mobile-first.”
Overall, Yahoo managed to beat expectations on earnings but revenue slipped to $1.1 billion from $1.2 billion in the same quarter last year. Earnings rose 46 percent, however, to $331 million, or 30 cents a share, from $227 million in the same quarter last year.
Investors apparently liked what they saw. Shares of Yahoo were up over 4 percent to $28 in early trading Wednesday