Still feeling the effects of a major reorganization, officials from search-engine Yahoo announced yesterday that third-quarter net income fell 5 percent, to $151.3 million, from $158.5 million in the same period a year earlier, despite third-quarter revenue rising 12 percent to $1.77 billion, from $1.58 billion. Net sales excluding payments Yahoo makes to other sites to acquire traffic were $1.28 billion from $1.12 billion, slightly surpassing the $1.24 billion expected from analysts polled by Thomson Financial.
Yahoo attributed the profit slip to weaker spending on advertising, but the Sunnyvale, Calif., company has weathered a lot of changes in the last year, with executives coming and going amid uncertainty about the way to run the business. The company replaced Terry Semel with co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO and reorganized into three core business segments this year in order to increase profitability. Yang said on a conference call that Yahoo plans to capture more of what he claimed is a $45 billion online ad opportunity that will rocket to $75 billion by 2010. Yahoo"s rivals include Google and Microsoft on this front.