Yahoo!’s (YHOO) CEO Marissa Mayer on Q3 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) hosted a conference call with investors and analysts to discuss Q3 2014 earnings results on October 21, 2014 at 5:00 p.m. ET. The following are the webcast audio and the associated transcript of the event…

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO)

Q3 2014 Results Earnings Conference Call

October 21, 2014 05:00 p.m. ET

Executives

Bianna Golodryga – Business Reporter

Marissa Mayer – Chief Executive Officer

Ken Goldman – Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Ben Schachter – Macquarie

Ron Josey – JMP Securities

Youssef Squali – Cantor Fitzgerald

Neil Doshi – CRT Capital

John Blackledge – Cowen and Company

Brian Wieser – Pivotal Research

Operator

Good afternoon and welcome to Yahoo!’s Third Quarter 2014 Earnings Video Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. The webcast today will be moderated by our business reporter from Yahoo! Finance, Bianna Golodryga.

Before getting started, I’d like to remind you that today’s presentation will contain forward-looking statements about our expected financial and operational performance including business and financial strategies, growth, revenue, products and ad sales. Actual results might differ materially from our projections.

Potential risks factors that could cause these differences are described in our Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on August 7, 2014. All information in this video is as of today, August 21, 2014 and we undertake no duty to update it for subsequent events.

Today’s discussion will include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of our non-GAAP results to the GAAP results we consider most comparable can be found in our earnings slides, which also contain full versions of the financial charts and graphs you will see in today’s video. We encourage you to review the complete earnings slides in our Investor Relations website at investor.yahoo.com under the Earnings.

And with that, let me turn the program over to Bianna.

Bianna Golodryga – Business Reporter

Welcome to Yahoo!’s third quarter 2014 earnings video webcast. I’m Bianna Golodryga again. I would be moderating today’s earnings event. Here with me are Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer; and Ken Goldman, Yahoo!’s Chief Financial Officer.

Today, we bring you prepared remarks from both Marissa and Ken around Yahoo!’s third quarter performance. Later, they will be answering your questions submitted via email. Institutional investors were encouraged to submit questions and we have selected a few questions that were representative of the group.

I’d like to now turn it over to Marissa to discuss Yahoo!’s third quarter business update. Marissa?

Marissa Mayer – Chief Executive Officer

Thank you for joining us on today’s call. We had a good solid third quarter. We delivered $1,094 million in revenue ex-TAC and $1,148 million in GAAP revenue. This represents 1% growth in revenue ex-TAC and 1% growth in GAAP.

We achieve this revenue growth with strong momentum in our new areas of investments; mobile, social, native and video, despite industry headwinds in some of our large legacy businesses. Our results were outside and above the top of our guidance range by $34 million on revenue ex-TAC and $48 million on GAAP revenue.

For my segment of today’s call I will cover our quarter then Alibaba. Then return to our strategy for the core business for M&A and for managing expenses. We’re turning now to Q3. We see strength in search and mobile.

Our investment businesses of social, mobile, native and video are collectively growing 80% year-over-year, and we are gaining momentum in the four key areas of our strategy, search, communications, digital magazines and video. Our results in display are mix within new investment areas growing triple digits, but with legacy PC display more than offsetting that growth.

Turning now to search, our search business continues to be strong showing 6% growth year-over-year on an ex-TAC basis. With our search click driven up 17% based largely on strong PPC trends and clicks flat year-over-year.

This quarter represents our 11th quarter of search revenue growth year-over-year on a revenue ex-TAC basis. Our price-per-click is up in almost all regions as we continue to find ways to enhance the performance of our search ads through better user interfaces and higher quality traffic and as advertisers ultimately find our search ads more valuable.