Yahoo! Reports 2005 Q1 Profits Above Expectations

For its first quarter ended last month, the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet giant posted earnings of $205 million, or 14 cents a share, up from the year-ago $101 million, or 7 cents a diluted share a year earlier. Excluding a penny-a-share gain on the sale of investments, latest-quarter earnings were 13 cents a share.

Revenue rose 49% from a year ago to $821 million on a so-called net basis, excluding the money Yahoo! shares with its paid search partners.

Wall Street analysts had forecast earnings of 11 cents a share on revenue of $797 million. : source

The stock market took a rather deep dive over the last week. Yahoo!'s stock is up 7% on the day. Google is trading in tandem, also up about 7% today.

Not too long ago Yahoo! announced that they approved buying back up to 3 billion dollars of shares. Last year they paid Terry Semel nearly a quarter billion dollars in stock based compensation.

Including traffic acquisition costs (money paid to traffic partners) Yahoo!'s quarterly quarterly revenue was $1.17 billion. If Yahoo! had to pay it's partners $350 million for traffic you can likely imagine that Yahoo! is also probably making a couple hundred million dollars from that traffic.

Their biggest traffic partner is MSN, who will likely be dropping Yahoo!'s services near the end of the year. The next couple days might be a good time to take some profits as Yahoo! will likely fall when MSN officially dumps their partnership. There is likely only one or two more quarterly reports before MSN makes the switch.

Yahoo! has a variety of revenue streams and is much less of a pure search play than Google, but paid search is their cash cow.

Of course I would not recommend taking stock advice from me ;)