Yahoo! says will grow organically in Asia
HONG KONG, April 13 (Reuters) - Internet portal Yahoo! Inc said on Tuesday its major growth in Asia will come organically and through strategic partnerships, rather than the sort of huge U.S. acquisitions the company has announced in recent months.
''You're not going to see us taking the approach of actually making an acquisition as a way of entering the market,'' said Heather Killen, Yahoo vice president, international.
''We're a very operationally driven organization. We believe in sticking to the knitting and building the business first,'' she said.
Killen's comments came as Yahoo! and Smartone Mobile Communications Ltd announced a deal for Yahoo! to provide web page content for Smartone's new Internet service business.
The deal also calls for Yahoo! and Smartone to cooperate on development of wireless data services for Smartone customers.
Yahoo earlier this month announced it would buy Internet audio and video provider Broadcast.com (Nasdaq:BCST - news), for US$5.7 billion in stock, a deal that comes on top of its January deal to buy personal web page publisher GeoCities Inc (Nasdaq:GCTY - news) for US$4.6 billion in stock.
Killen said the company may consider smaller acquisitions and strategic partnerships in Asia that could help further develop the overall internet market, but will not stray from its business model, which focuses on internal growth.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang noted that Yahoo's earnings growth in the first quarter was driven mainly by organic daily page view growth of about 40 percent.
''We really believe that this business has a lot of organic growth potential,'' Yang said. ''We're feeding on tremendous organic growth and supplementing and complementing that with acquisitions.''
The Smartone internet service will be initially offered to the company's approximately 500,000 mobile subscribers, potentially adding a substantial number of daily page views to Yahoo's business in Hong Kong. |
