Did Yahoo’s Earnings Wow Investors?

Marissa Mayer has completed her first full quarter as Yahoo’s (NASDAQ:YHOO) Chief Executive Officer, and it’s time for her to prove that the company is on its way to a profitable future.

Yahoo showed promise in the third quarter. After 100 days in office, Mayer and Yahoo released quarterly earnings in late October that beat Wall Street’s expectations. In the earnings conference call, she identified the main problem facing the company: its transition to mobile. Now, with earnings that narrowly surpassed analysts’ estimates for the fourth quarter, has Mayer shown enough evidence that the company has begun to make good on those promises?

Yahoo did show improvement, ending a three-year revenue slump with this quarter’s results. For the three-month period, the company posted earnings of $272 million, or 23 cents per share, which represented an 8 percent decrease over the year-ago quarter. Earnings would have beaten the previous year’s results had a one-time accounting charge been excluded. Revenue increased 2 percent to $1.35 billion, which helped the web portal make its first full-year revenue gain since 2008. Including traffic acquisition costs, the company generated $1.221 billion in revenue…