Yahoo! Q3 2013 Results

This quarter Yahoo! released more than 15 significant new product updates, modernizing and increasing user engagement across their digital daily habits. 

In late September, Yahoo! Screen was launched, a new video destination for mobile, tablet and desktop. Yahoo! Screen is home to Yahoo! original programming as well as the Saturday Night Live Archives, NBC Sports, South Park, the Daily Show, the Paul Bearer Report and ARF. 

The company has seen a 100% growth in daily active users over the last quarter and a 50% increase over last season. In late July, Yahoo! launched fantasy mobile apps for Android and iOS complete with native live draft capabilities. For the more engaging experience on mobile, the company has already seen a 50% increase in daily active users for this app over last season.

In Q3, for the first time in eight years, Yahoo! launched a massive upgrade, making it more beautiful, colorful and easier to organize and discover favorite parts of the web, all in one place. 

After years of global traffic decline, Yahoo managed to reverse this negative trend and in June of 2013, it achieved year-over-year growth, effectively erasing the decline from the prior year. 

For core Yahoo!, the page view milestones were another only accomplishment this quarter. In September, Yahoo! announced that they have more than 800 million monthly unique users. This represents a 20% increase in monthly unique users over the past 15 months.

It means that Yahoo! has attracted more than 100 million new monthly users and while with the page views, about surpassing 2011 or 2012, Yahoo! has never before in its history had 800 million monthly unique users on its core network.

Last quarter, Yahoo! recorded a 340 million mobile user number. And today, the company now sees more than 390 million monthly mobile users. This represents nearly 15% growth in the past quarter.

In Q3, Yahoo! received more than 17,000 resumes in a single week. This is up from 12,000 in August, 10,000 in May and 2,000 in January, a more than 8x increase year-to-date.

Yahoo! made eight critical acquisitions in Q3, including Bignoggins, Qwiki, Admovate, Ztelic, Lexity, Rockmelt, IQ Engines and Xobni. The company integrated Bignoggins technology into their widely successful Yahoo! Fantasy App just 24 days after the acquisition.

The capital spending was once again down significantly year-over-year to $78 million a period and $229 million on a year-to-date basis. The nine month spend is down 36% from the same period in 2012. Operating expenses were higher than 3Q as the management forecasted before.

Yahoo! continues to have a very strong balance with nearly $3.2 billion of cash and securities. In this quarter, Yahoo! returned an additional $1.7 billion to shareholders through share buybacks.

This brings their total buyback January 2012 to nearly $5.3 billion with which they repurchased just nearly 250 million shares at an average price of $21.25. Yahoo! generated free-cash flow up $449 million in the third quarter and $530 million year-to-date and have ample liquidity to fund any investment needs.

Guidance:

For the fourth quarter, Yahoo! expects revenue ex-TAC to be in the range of $1.18 billion to $1.22 billion, adjusted EBITDA to be between $400 million and $420 million, and non-GAAP operating income to be between $240 million and $260 million.

Yahoo!’s full year ranges are, revenue ex-TAC to be in the range of $4.4 billion to $4.45 billion, adjusted EBITDA to be between $1.48 billion and $1.5 billion and non-GAAP operating income to be between $840 million to $860 million.