Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and SAP report strong earnings, pointing to continued growth in online advertising, mobile, and cloud services. 

Yahoo Report Strongest Growth in Display Since 2010

Yahoo reported revenue growth of 15% year-over-year yesterday driven by strong growth in display and innovation in mobile search, as the company continues to transform. GAAP revenue increased from $1,084m in Q2 2014 to $1,243 in Q2 2015. However, increased cost of revenue ($44m in Q2 2014, $200m in Q2 2015) and a loss from operations of $45m meant that Yahoo reported a net loss of $22m compared to net earnings of $270m in Q2 2014.

Highlights

-- GAAP search revenue was $521 million for Q2 2015, an increase of 22% year-over-year

-- GAAP display revenue was $500 million for Q2 2015, a 15% increase year-over-year

-- Paid Search clicks increased approximately 13%, compared to the Q2 2014

-- Paid Search CPC increased approximately 4%, compared to Q2 2014

-- The number of display ads sold increased by approximately 9% year-over-year

-- Price-per-ad increased by approximately 10% year-over-year

-- Mobile revenue represented 22% of traffic-driven revenue in Q2 2015, up from 16% in Q2 2014

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, said: "I'm extremely pleased with our achievements in Q2, with revenue growing 15% year-over-year, marking our most substantial GAAP revenue growth in almost nine years. Furthermore, our display business saw the most substantial revenue growth since 2010. Yahoo's transformation continues to make great progress."

CFO Ken Goldman said: "As we continued to reduce our workforce to fewer than 11,000 full-time employees over the last quarter, we have also continued to realign our resources as we become a more efficient business."

Developments in ad tech

Yahoo announced the availability of independent viewability and fraud measurement for display and video advertising across the company's programmatic buying platform, including Yahoo Properties. Advertisers can now choose from leading accredited, third-party measurement solutions to independently validate for viewability and fraud across display and video at every stage of the campaign lifecycle.

Looking to take a slice of brand's growing programmatic advertising budgets, Yahoo introduced new ad formats designed to help advertisers reach their audiences: native video and video app-install ads.

Developments in search and display

In Q2, Yahoo introduced a new mobile search experience in the U.S. that connects users immediately to the people, places and things they care about by using context and location cues to deliver the most relevant search results.

Yahoo has also launched new digital content, including 14 new shows across Yahoo's digital magazine channels and a live global Electronic Music competition-style live series that is executive produced by Simon Cowell. In Q2, Live Nation and Yahoo continued their partnership by kicking off a music festival live stream series to bring artists' performances from this year's most anticipated music festivals to its global audience.

Microsoft cloud and hardware results drives fourth quarter performance

Microsoft reported a loss of $2.1bn loss in its Q4 2015, despite commercial cloud annualised revenue run rate exceeding $8bn; and Computing and Gaming Hardware, (including Xbox and Surface), delivering nearly $2bn in revenue.

Highlights

-- $22.2bn in revenue, compared to $23.3bn last year

-- Revenue dropped 38% to $748m

-- Search advertising revenue grew 21%

-- Bing US market share is now 20.3%, up 110 basis points year-over-year, CTO Satya Nadella said on the call that Bing will become profitable in the coming fiscal year

Devices and consumer revenue declined (10% in constant currency), however, commercial revenue increased slightly (4% in constant currency). Highlights in the commercial sector include: 88% increase in commercial cloud revenue (96% in constant currency), server products and services revenue growth of 4% (9% in constant currency) and growth in revenue from dynamics of 6% (15% in constant currency), with the Dynamics CRM Online install base growing almost two and a half fold.

Earlier this month, ExchangeWire speculated that Microsoft were checking out of ad tech handing over responsibility for display, mobile, and video advertising inventory in nine markets and increasing their focus on cloud services. The most recent earnings figures seem to support this theory.

Record revenue of almost $50bn for Apple

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal Q3 2015. The company posted quarterly revenue of $49.6 billion (up 33% year-over-year) and quarterly net profit of $10.7bn, compared to $37.4bn in revenue and net profit of $7.7bn in Q3 2014. The growth was fuelled by record third quarter sales of iPhone and Mac (although both fell below analysts’ expectations), all-time record revenue from services and the successful launch of Apple Watch.

“We had an amazing quarter, with iPhone revenue up 59% over last year, strong sales of Mac, all-time record revenue from services, driven by the App Store, and a great start for Apple Watch,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The excitement for Apple Music has been incredible, and we’re looking forward to releasing iOS 9, OS X El Capitan and watchOS 2 to customers in the fall.”

The continued growth in mobile devices and App services bodes well for marketers. Engaging with consumers on mobile devices yield significant, if not always measurable, results.  

SAP’s cloud revenue up 129%

Yesterday, SAP reported strong growth in the cloud with new cloud bookings (a key measure of sales) up 162% in the second quarter to €203 million. Cloud and software revenue increased 21% to €4.06bn. Operating Profit Increased 13% to €1.39bn.

“When I speak with CEOs, they are looking for a road map to digitise their business and to create new business models,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “Our business is thriving because we have the most complete vision for how to make this transition to digital business a simple one. I am confident that our strategy to deliver a platform, applications and business networks is exactly what customers need from SAP.”

Strong momentum in customer engagement and commerce applications

We also saw strong growth in Customer Engagement and Commerce where SAP is helping businesses track and engage customers in real-time across all channels and seamlessly execute and fulfil ecommerce in one end-to-end value chain. New cloud bookings for Customer Engagement and Commerce once again saw strong triple digit growth.

After hours share price changes:

Yahoo (YHOO) 39.00 -0.73 (-1.84%)

Microsoft (MSFT) 45.40 -1.88 (-3.98%)

Apple (AAPL) 121.80 -8.95 (-6.85%)