Yahoo!: Doomed For Failure?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on January 30, 2008

If you’ve been keeping up with certain blogs and news, Yahoo is cutting down on jobs and for the past year or two, because of Google, has been in shaky territory. Here is what bothers me more then anything else, how does the property on the net with the most traffic have such a hard time?

Lets look at some stats:

Fiscal Year Ends: 31-Dec
Most Recent Quarter (mrq): 30-Sep-07

Profitability
Profit Margin (ttm): 10.57%
Operating Margin (ttm): 12.30%

Management Effectiveness
Return on Assets (ttm): 4.68%
Return on Equity (ttm): 8.33%

Income Statement
Revenue (ttm): 6.84B
Revenue Per Share (ttm): 5.083
Qtrly Revenue Growth (yoy): 11.80%
Gross Profit (ttm): 3.75B
EBITDA (ttm): 1.46B
Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): 722.95M
Diluted EPS (ttm): 0.51
Qtrly Earnings Growth (yoy): -4.60%

The numbers it shows are all pretty positive but it has this weight on its shoulders and pressure to compete against Google. If Yahoo has an advertisement on TV (lets say during the superbowl) giving small businesses stats on their search and explaining what paid search is, sales would skyrocket. Same thing goes for Google but I guess they depend on advertisers or marketers like us to put out the word.

Is Yahoo too big for their own good?