Yahoo 2005 Annual Report Download - page 19

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Our local version of Yahoo! in Japan is operated by Yahoo! Japan Corporation (“Yahoo! Japan”), a
publicly traded company in Japan that is majority owned by SOFTBANK Corp. and its consolidated
affiliates (collectively “SOFTBANK”). We have a joint venture in Japan with SOFTBANK, which was
formed to establish and manage a local version of our properties. As of December 31, 2005, we owned
approximately 34 percent of Yahoo! Japan.
During the year, we acquired full ownership of our joint ventures in the United Kingdom, France,
Germany and Korea from SOFTBANK. Our local version of Yahoo! in each of these countries had
previously been operated and managed by these joint ventures.
Additionally during the year, we purchased approximately 46 percent of the outstanding common stock of
Alibaba, which represents approximately 40 percent on a fully diluted basis, in exchange for $1.0 billion in
cash and the contribution of our China based businesses (“Yahoo! China”).
SALES
We maintain three primary channels for selling our marketing services: telemarketing, online, and direct.
Our telemarketing channel focuses on sales of marketing services to small and medium-size businesses.
Our online channel is fulfilled by a self-service program that enables advertisers to place targeted text
based links to their websites on the Yahoo! Properties as well as on our affiliates’ websites. Our direct
advertising sales team focuses on selling our marketing services and solutions to leading advertising
agencies and marketers in the United States. During 2005, we aligned our graphical advertising sales team
under the common leadership of our search sales team to better respond to our most important advertisers
who are increasingly using both forms of advertising on Yahoo! Properties to achieve their desired
marketing goals. No individual customer represented more than 10 percent of our revenues in 2003, 2004
or 2005.
We employ sales professionals in locations across the United States, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago,
Dallas, Detroit, the Los Angeles area, Miami, New York, San Francisco, and Sunnyvale. Our sales
organization consults regularly with agencies and advertisers on design and placement of online
advertising, and provides customers with measurements and analyses of advertising effectiveness as well as
effective consumer insights that can be turned into marketing campaigns. In addition to our geographic
sales structure, we have sales teams for automotive, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, finance,
retail, pharmaceuticals, sports, technology, telecommunications and travel. In international markets, we
have either our own internal sales professionals or we have established sales agency relationships in more
than 20 countries.
MARKETING
We believe that world-class marketing can be a competitive advantage. The Yahoo! brand is one of the
most widely recognized in the world. Maintaining and growing that brand enables us to attract, retain, and
more deeply engage users and advertisers. We believe a great brand begins with a great product. Yahoo!
marketing engages in each step of product development, deployment and management to understand our
offerings and how best to market them to our audience of potential and existing users. Our marketing
communications efforts help accelerate product momentum, awareness, adoption, and engagement.
We use online, television, print, radio and outdoor advertising, and we leverage our global online network
and our distribution partnerships to market our products and services to the right people at the right time.
With continued investment in global brand and product marketing, we believe we can continue to
attract and engage users and advertisers.