Yahoo! misses profit for first quarter - but has a great revenue quarter

Posted Apr 19th 2006 10:00AM by Brian White
Filed under: After the Bell, Earnings Reports, Yahoo! (YHOO)

Yahoo! seemed to be poised to report lower-than-expected profut numbers for the first quarter, and it was was a bomb-drop after the close of the markets yesterday. First-quarter profts plunged 22% while revenue was up 34%. So, although ad sales were strong in the quarter -- and this was expected -- the profit amount went down on almost the same slant. Is this all due to stock grants given to employees during the quarter?

Susan Decker, Yahoo's CFO, cited that search traffic for the quarter climbed 15 to 20 percent against the year-ago period -- this probably caused the revenue surge since advertising dollars/revenue went right along with all those increased searches, as revenue climbed to $1.57 billion from the year-ago amount of $1.17 billion. But, a 22% drop in profits must have come from many places -- beyond stock grants, perhaps.

What will archrival Google report this Thursday on its first-quarter numbers? We will see soon enough.

Tags: Google, Yahoo!