Yahoo 2005 Annual Report Download - page 9

Download and view the complete annual report

Please find page 9 of the 2005 Yahoo annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

Page out of 118

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • 54
  • 55
  • 56
  • 57
  • 58
  • 59
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 65
  • 66
  • 67
  • 68
  • 69
  • 70
  • 71
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • 77
  • 78
  • 79
  • 80
  • 81
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • 89
  • 90
  • 91
  • 92
  • 93
  • 94
  • 95
  • 96
  • 97
  • 98
  • 99
  • 100
  • 101
  • 102
  • 103
  • 104
  • 105
  • 106
  • 107
  • 108
  • 109
  • 110
  • 111
  • 112
  • 113
  • 114
  • 115
  • 116
  • 117
  • 118

3
Part I
Item 1. Business
OVERVIEW
Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (“Yahoo!”, the “Company”, “our”, “we”, or “us”),
is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. We seek
to provide Internet services that are essential and relevant to users and businesses. To users, we provide
our owned and operated online properties and services (the “Yahoo! Properties”). To businesses, we
provide a range of tools and marketing solutions designed to enable businesses to reach our community of
users. Yahoo! was developed and first made available in 1994 by our founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang,
while they were graduate students at Stanford University. We were incorporated in 1995 and are a
Delaware corporation. We are headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and have offices in Asia, Australia,
Canada, Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
We seek to leverage the power of the Yahoo! Properties to create the most innovative and highest quality
Internet services for users and to provide the most efficient and effective marketing services for businesses
to reach these users. We focus on increasing our user base and deepening the engagement of our users on
the Yahoo! Properties to enhance the value of our user base to advertisers and to increase the spending of
these advertisers. We believe that we can increase our user base by offering compelling Internet services
and effectively integrating search, community, personalization, and content to create a powerful user
experience. These global user relationships and the social community created enable us to leverage our
offered forms of online advertising as well as premium services for users.
We also focus on extending our marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond the Yahoo!
Properties through our distribution network of third party entities (which we refer to as “affiliates”) who
have integrated our search offerings into their websites.
Many of our services are free to our users. We generate revenue by providing marketing services to
businesses across the majority of our properties and by establishing paying relationships with our users for
premium services. We classify these revenues as either marketing services or fees. Our offerings to users
and businesses currently fall into four categories — Search; Marketplace; Information and Entertainment;
and Communications and Connected Life. The majority of our offerings are available globally in more
than 15 languages.
2005 HIGHLIGHTS
During 2005, our key accomplishments that we believe will allow us to further our mission to provide
Internet services that are essential and relevant to users and businesses include:
Strengthened our international presence:
• China — We entered into a strategic partnership with Alibaba.com Corporation (“Alibaba”), a
large e-commerce company in China operating a leading online marketplace and an online payment
system. The combination of our China based businesses with Alibaba has created one of the largest
Internet companies in China that we believe is well positioned to provide services to China’s local
emerging and fast growing Internet market.
• Europe and Korea — We acquired the remaining shares of our joint ventures in France, Germany
and the United Kingdom (collectively “Yahoo! Europe”) and Yahoo! Korea, bringing our
ownership in these entities to 100 percent. Full ownership of the Yahoo! Properties in Europe and
Korea provides us with greater flexibility to take advantage of international growth opportunities in
the Internet market in these regions.