Yahoo First Quarter Results: Revenue Dips Slightly, Profits Increase 84
New submitter dolilmao was the first with the news of Yahoo's first quarter results. From Techcrunch: "Yahoo just released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2013, with better-than-expected (non-GAAP) earnings of $420 million, or 38 cents per share. Revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) was flat compared to last year, at $1.07 billion. Analysts has predicted that the company would report revenue of $1.1 billion and 24 cents EPS. Wall Street normally evaluates Yahoo on an ex-TAC basis — including traffic acquisition costs, revenue was $1.14 billion, down 7 percent from last year."
Except that does not seem to be the case (Score:4, Informative)
If you scan through the Income statement, and look through its operating expenses the big change is a decrease in "Traffic Acquisition Cost" which explains most of the decrease in expenses about 80% of it (and the decrease in revenue too). It looks like they cut back on deals that were costing more than the revenue they were getting (or focuses on more profitable traffic etc).
Non-GAAP numbers (Score:5, Informative)
Hey guys, I did my own non-GAAP numbers for my income, and I made a net profit of $23 billion dollars last year! And I can prove it, I used Enron's old accountants to do it!
Non-GAAP means nothing. GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principals. You're only allowed to report taxes/earnings etc using GAAP. Using GAAP means you followed the rules, and conversely non-GAAP quite literally means you ignored all of the rules and made up your own. Really.
To put it another way, GAAP is to professional accountants as ITEF's RFC is to networking engineers.
Always ignore non-GAAP numbers, because it's how marketing drones convince dumb journalists (or worse, Slashdot editors) to publish fake, reverse FUD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_accepted_accounting_principles [wikipedia.org]
Always wait for the quarterly earnings report, THAT is required by law to use GAAP.