Yahoo’s net income grows 36% while revenue falls 7%

Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, reported on Tuesday (April 16, 2013) that the company’s first-quarter profit grew 36% to $390 million, or 35 cents a share, up from $286.3 million, or 23 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding restructuring charges and other items, adjusted earnings of the internet giant rose to 38 cents from 27 cents. After subtracting partner commissions, Yahoo’s search advertising revenue also increased by 6 percent to $409 million, compared to $384 million from the same quarter of 2012. 

In the United States, total display advertising increased 18.1 percent to $17.7 billion as well.

Meanwhile, the firm’s revenue was $1.14 billion, down 7 percent from the year-ago quarter. Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs was $1.07 billion, down 0.3%. In the first quarter, revenue from Yahoo's core display-ad business fell 11%, to $455 million, compared with a year ago.

To revitalize Yahoo's business, Marissa Mayer, a former Google Inc. (GOOG) executive, has vowed to improve Yahoo's mobile services for smartphones and tablets. In recent months, she has made several small acquisitions of mobile software startups as well as put the company’s engineers to work making Yahoo’s Web products more applicable to mobile users. Those efforts seem to have paid off as Yahoo now has more than 300 million monthly mobile users, up from 200 million three months ago.

Yahoo was once the biggest seller of display ads but the company lost that position to Facebook and Google in 2011.