Earning Recaps: Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, UPS, Amazon

Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO): Neutrality with a Need for Innovation

Earnings Info: Earned 13 cents a share, beating analyst expectations by 6 cents.

Revenues fell 15%, but still beat analyst estimates by a fraction.

Since new CEO Carol Bartz missed the conference call, CFO Tim Morse took the reins and reiterated, “We know that Google (GOOG) monetizes better than we do,” he conceded. “That’s well chronicled.”

Comment: YHOO is planning to merge its search business with competitor Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to compete for Google’s search ad market share. Even though earnings numbers looked good due to cost-cutting, revenues are still declining at too high a pace to consider major upside potential for YHOO just yet.

eBAY (Nasdaq: EBAY): The Online Marketplace that Holds its Weight

Earnings Info: Earnings dropped 29% in the 3rd quarter.

Total Revenues rose 6%.

CEO John Donahoe stated on the earnings call, “We’re cautiously optimistic about consumer spending going into the holiday season.”

Comment: Ebay continues to be a powerhouse online marketplace for people to buy/sell goods. Their active users increased 2% year-over-year to 89.2 million. Ebay’s customer base remains intact, a tell-tale sign of a steady performer.

Microsoft (MSFT): Windows 7 is All Buzz

Earnings Info: Earned 40 cents a share, better than the 32 cents a share analysts forecasted.

Revenues declined 14%.

Comment: Monster MSFT's continued employee reduction and cost-cutting program are proving a leaner machine will arise going forward. Will Windows 7 deliver? Early signs show success, but we all know what happened with Vista.

UPS: Delivery Slows, Recession Signs Resurfacing?

Earnings Info: Earnings declined 43% from a year ago.

Revenues declined 15%.

CFO Kurt Kuehn said, “We still have a long way to go,” when speaking to the slow economic recovery currently at hand.

Comment: With a decline in the volume of packages delivered over the course of the quarter, we have yet another sign from UPS that growth in the U.S. economy is still not here.

Amazon (AMZN): The Future of Publishing is Here! All-time High for AMZN Share Price

Earnings Info: Earnings rose 69% and beat analyst expectations.

Revenue jumped 28%, easily passing up analyst estimates.

Executives on the earnings call said the Kindle is now the most popular product on AMZN’s site. The sentiment on the earnings call was simple: AMZN is feeling the growth.

Comment: Not only is the Zappos acquisition providing more muscle to AMZN, but they are flexing their product innovation power with the successful Kindle. Be careful that giddy analysts raise the earnings expectation bar for AMZN too high, too quickly. Bottom line: AMZN is no longer the future of retailing, they are the present. Amazon ended the quarter with more than 98 million active customer accounts, up 17 percent from a year ago.

Comments

[Philip Cohen:]

Re eBay: Hang on, if, since the introduction of masked bidding IDs, every one of the many unscrupulous sellers on eBay now has 10-20 shill bidding IDs, that increase in "active users" should be a lot more than (only) 2%; methinks there has probably been a real decrease in genuine users. Face facts, the "Ho Ho Ho" has not got the faintest idea of what he is doing at eBay, except for holding his finger on the toilet flush button ...

Oct 25 09:35 PM