PALO ALTO, California -- Yahoo, the first major Internet company to report earnings for the first quarter, weighed in Wednesday with solid results.
The company said its revenue more than doubled compared to same period last year, while profits more than tripled.
The earnings announcement comes in the midst of an extraordinarily turbulent week for Internet and technology stocks. The Nasdaq index has seen both record plunges and rapid-fire recoveries, with Net and tech stocks particularly sensitive to volatility.
Because Yahoo is viewed as a bellwether for the rest of the Internet sector, its earnings will likely play a role in Thursday's trading. But since the results were more or less in line with what Wall Street expected, it's unlikely to trigger any panic buttons.
The company said its first-quarter earnings before unusual items totaled $63.3 million, or 10 cents per diluted share, compared with $17.7 million, or 3 cents, in the year-ago quarter. The earnings were a penny above the official consensus forecast of analysts.
Shares of Yahoo, however, were down moderately in after-hours trade shortly after the results were announced. The stock, which had fallen 1-13/16 to close at 165-9/16, was quoted around 161-1/2 in after-market activity.
It was not immediately clear whether investors were disappointed that Yahoo had not beaten official forecasts by a wider margin, as it has done in the past, or if the drop reflected general nervousness in the market.
Yahoo said revenues in the first quarter were $228.4 million, up from $103.9 million a year earlier, while page views of its websites averaged 625 million per day in March, up about 34 percent from 465 million in December.
The strong growth in page views was a positive surprise to some analysts who had forecast the company would only achieve single-digit growth. Yahoo said that much of the growth came from overseas. In Japan alone, it now has 14 million users, and its total global audience now numbers 145 million.
"Our results in the first quarter continue to demonstrate that we have created a global service that resonates with users and a business with inherent self-reinforcing scale from which strong financial results can be derived," Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle said in a statement.
The company said much of its plans for future growth involve distributing its content to wireless devices, like cellphones, that will enable consumers to get connected to the Internet anywhere and at any time.
Yahoo said its auctions service surpassed 2.5 million daily listings in the quarter, up from 1.5 million in December.
Yahoo also named Susan Decker, global head of research at brokerage Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, as its new chief financial officer, replacing Gary Valenzuela, who will retire in July.
(Reuters contributed to this report)
