Mary Meeker asks a question?
The Upshot: Mary's Anything but Meeker on Yahoo! Conference Call
By George Mannes
Senior Writer
2/2/01 12:02 PM ET
Most conference calls following companies' quarterly earnings releases are pretty straightforward. Unless, it seems, if the company is Yahoo! (YHOO:Nasdaq - news) and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Internet analyst Mary Meeker is on the line.
Earnings season isn't yet complete, but we here at TheStreet.com are already prepared to hand out a very special award to Meeker for her achievement on the Yahoo! fourth quarter earnings call held Jan. 10 . That award is -- drum roll, please -- The Longest Question Asked on an Earnings Call. Heck, we're pretty sure her record, like Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak, will stand unbroken for generations.
Usually, Q&A sessions on these conference calls are run on a tight schedule. The ritual begins with some operator reminding the analysts on the line that they're limited to one question apiece; the analysts often squeeze in two. Even if they do, however, they've usually finished with what they've got to say in about 20 seconds.
Except for Meeker on the Yahoo! call. The low-key, usually closed-mouth analyst opened up for an audience of investors and Yahoo! execs. She started asking her question.
And kept on asking.
And asking, in what sounded at first like one long sentence best described as Faulkneresque, in honor of the Nobel laureate who sometimes couldn't find his typewriter's period key.
It took two minutes and 57 seconds for her to wrap up her question. To put that in perspective, Meeker's meanderings occupied 17% of the time that Yahoo! had allotted for Q&A to the multitude of analysts on the call -- presumably all of whom were dying to squeeze in a question to CEO Tim "T.K." Koogle and other Yahoo! execs.
We called up Morgan Stanley to get an exegesis from Meeker, but she never returned our call. We assume she's just resting her voice for next quarter's call.
Moderator: Mary Meeker, with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, please go ahead with your question.
Mary Meeker: Yes, thanks, we have a couple questions and I'm going to try to oversimplify something here, and it may, it may, I may be going in the wrong direction, but in listening to what you're saying, it looks like revenue, the revenue range estimate for '01 is, say, 10 to 15% lower than consensus was, the dot-com mix for your revenue for '01 will be, as it should be, down a lot as a percent -- as a contributor to revenue -- and I guess the way we're looking at it is you basically take a chunk of the dot-com revenue and it's gone, and that is what it is, but the rest of the business that's driving your revenue is pretty solid.
You indicated, Jeff [Mallett, Yahoo!'s president], that CPMs don't appear to be changing a lot, a little more comment on that -- and, and you might want to take a note or two here, because I'm going to, I'm going to -- this is going to be long-winded, and I apologize, it's one long run-on sentence, but you have, you don't have a big CPM [?] that you -- it seems to be relatively stable with your bigger, more solid customers who actually know how to pay their bills, that's kind of a look at the revenue and a question is in there.
The second thing, on the operating expenses, because of the unbelievably powerful leverage you have with the organic, really high margins that you have, I'd almost argue you're being too conservative by, by not, by not being a little more aggressive on the uptick for opex, but -- and this is a question -- is that a function of the fact that the environment is less competitive so you don't need to feel -- you don't feel the kind of pressure to move as aggressively as you have in the past, to go in as many directions as you had to in the past in what was a wild, wacky, underlying environment.
Third question, or third part of the question, is you talked about subscription revenues, T.K. mentioned that, and in effect an effort to monetize the customer base a little more aggressively than you have in the past -- could you do it faster if you chose to do it faster, are you -- if we're putting it pedal to the metal and 10 is really to the metal -- are you going from what was maybe two to four, when you could go to seven if you wanted to, and in the last part of the question, is your revenue forecast for '01 is 9 to 18%, but your user growth for the fourth quarter year-to-year was up about 50% -- for the fourth quarter that was just reported -- your usage growth was up 94%, are you willing to give us any guidance on user and usage growth for '01 that would give us a lot of confidence that you, as you should, I think, see as very, very powerful acceleration in revenue growth in '01.
And if I was only allowed one question, just please answer one of those, and I'll shut up. Thanks.
Tim Koogle: OK [chuckle]. Thanks, Mary. Um, well, we really appreciate your question, actually. I'm, I'm going to try to back up away from it, maybe, and, and reframe things -- frame things a little bit . . .
To listen for yourself, go to Yahoo!'s archive of the call and fast-forward 45 minutes and 56 seconds. webevents.broadcast.com
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One the worst ramblings that I heard. I guess people don't write questions down.
Jack |
