SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) โ Yahoo Inc.'s second-quarter earnings report will give the Internet company another chance to show it's headed in the right direction after years of missteps that have left many investors exasperated.
The results, due out after the stock market closes Tuesday, are likely to either ease or intensify the pressure on CEO Carol Bartz as she approaches the final 17 months of the four-year contract she signed in 2009.
Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., pinned its turnaround hopes on Bartz after the company's two previous CEOs โ co-founder Jerry Yang and Terry Semel โ were unable to generate robust revenue growth when money flowed across the Internet.
The big winners over the past five years have been Internet search leader Google Inc. and, more recently, Facebook, whose website has turned into one of the most alluring destinations on the Web while Yahoo has seemingly lost its swagger.
Google's second-quarter revenue surged 32 percent from last to surpass $9 billion for the first time, a stellar performance that Yahoo isn't expected to match.
Investors will likely be content if Yahoo posts even modest gains in display advertising, a term used to describe graphical messages. Yahoo probably needs to limit the second-quarter decline in its advertising to the 10 percent to 15 percent range. Yahoo blamed a 19 percent drop in its first-quarter search advertising on unexpected trouble in a recently launched partnership with Microsoft Corp.
With overall revenue eroding, Bartz has laid off hundreds of workers, closed services and cut other costs to boost profits.
Yahoo is expected to earn 18 cents per share in the second quarter on net revenue of $1.1 billion, according to an analyst survey by FactSet. At the same time last year, Yahoo earned 15 cents per share on net revenue of $1.1 billion.
Wall Street will be even more enthused if Yahoo announces a resolution to a costly change that diminished the value of its 43 percent stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group. Alibaba spun off its online payment service, Alipay, into another company run by its CEO without compensating Yahoo for the loss.
Since the May 10 disclosure of the Alipay spinoff, Yahoo's shares have plunged 23 percent and erased about $7 billion in shareholder wealth. Bartz has said several times that Yahoo is working on a settlement with Alibaba.
Yahoo shares closed Monday at $14.42.


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