Yahoo 2012 Annual Report Download - page 5

David Filo
Founder and Chief Yahoo
Marissa Mayer
CEO, President and Director
To our shareholders
It’s been an exciting year at Yahoo! — one of
great change and great inspiration. We have
significantly increased our pace of execution
and focused on product excellence, user
experience, and growth. Our financials have seen
continued stability; in fact, 2012 was our first
year of ex-TAC revenue growth in four years.
Over the past 18 years, Yahoo! has become
a daily habit for hundreds of millions of users
worldwide and has grown into one of the
Internet’s most loved and iconic brands. Today,
we remain dedicated to creating products that
inspire and delight our users every day, and we
are working to reach even more users across
a broad array of platforms, including mobile. To
that end, we are developing and reimagining
the experiences that are at the center of people’s
everyday digital habits. These are the same
products that have been at Yahoo!’s core
throughout our history — including Mail, Search,
News, Sports, Finance, Groups, and Answers.
Last year, we made early progress in enhancing
these products with a new design for Yahoo!
Mail across four key platforms — desktop, iOS,
Android, and Windows 8 — as well as the launch
of our Flickr mobile application, lauded as
best in class. However, this is just the beginning.
In 2013, we will demonstrate a cadence of
innovation in our principal product offerings.
We are also increasing the value we bring to
our advertisers and partners. When ads are
personal, consumers respond. Yahoo! is one of
the largest global platforms that combine
personalized content at scale with highly relevant
advertising to reach the right audience at the
right time. We believe that ads are a core part
of our offering, and we see an incredible
number of opportunities where advertising
can enhance the quality of our products and
the user experience.
While Yahoo! is committed to user, product, and
revenue growth, we’ve also demonstrated
discipline and a focus on profitability. Furthering
our commitment to shareholders, we returned
approximately $2.2 billion through share
repurchases last year.
Inside the company, we will continue to invest
in talent. Companies are all about people, and the
companies with the best talent win. This is why
we have embarked on a number of initiatives to
make Yahoo! the absolute best place to work —
greater transparency, clearer accountability, and
benefits that increase employee efficiency
and well-being. This commitment to our team
will enable us to produce the most compelling
and exciting user experiences anywhere, and
it will have long-lasting benefits for our users,
advertisers, partners, and shareholders. Our
company’s performance is a testimony to the
hard work and capabilities of our employees,
and we are incredibly excited about the future
we will create.
In that future, the Internet will continue to
change the way people learn, share, and
communicate, and Yahoo! will strive to be a
central part of this evolution. We need to
continue Yahoo!’s tradition of bold innovation,
and ultimately inspire and delight users and
advertisers globally. We see enormous
opportunity in front of us.
Thank you for your belief in our vision. Your
support allows us to build exquisite products
and experiences, which will make our users’ daily
habits inspiring and delightful for years to come.
Photo top left by simonlchung
from the Flickr Collection