Yahoo Sees Rosy Future without Microsoft - A Closer Look at Yahoo’s Figures
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To call Yahoo’s presentation optimistic is almost an understatement. One presentation slide flatly states that “We believe our growth and profitability prospects are not fully appreciated by the public market.” Tell that to the 1,100 employees Yahoo laid off earlier this year!
Yahoo did focus fairly strongly on its Asian position in the presentation, as if to counterbalance the latest economic news and indications of the US entering a recession. The company holds a 33 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, which dominates that market. It also holds a 39 percent stake in Alibaba, a Chinese business-to-business site. On the other hand, rumors are circulating from no less of a source than Forbes that Alibaba’s leadership wants to buy Yahoo’s stake back in order to keep the company independent if Yahoo is bought out by Microsoft.
Yahoo has other numbers working for it, ones that pale only in the shadow of Google. Just looking at the large number of visitors it receives boggles the mind: 305 million unique monthly users of its home page and 262 million unique monthly users of Yahoo Mail. This doesn’t even count all the users of Yahoo’s other properties, like Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo also emphasized a number of very new social media projects. In particular, it pointed to social news site Yahoo Buzz, which I reviewed recently. It also mentioned a mobile service that has yet to launch, Yahoo OneConnect. Apparently it expects these projects to really take off.
I wish I could be more optimistic about Yahoo’s ability with social web projects, especially since I think they really do “get” Web 2.0 there. But in all honesty, Yahoo’s performance in this area has been haphazard. Yahoo Groups remains very popular, and Yahoo Buzz looks like another winner. On the other hand, there’s Yahoo 360, which never quite took off. And Yahoo Mash, launched in September 2007, is still in invite-only beta mode, and seems to be flying under most people’s radar. Some observers believe that Yahoo Mash was created to out-Facebook Facebook when Yahoo failed to purchase the massively popular social site; a lack of buzz in this case is not a good sign for the future.
Next: Analysts’ Views >>
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