Yahoo grows on

Internet firm Yahoo has reported profits three times the level of a year ago as traffic to its sites continues to soar.

The company said its first-quarter earnings, before one-off items, totalled $63.3m, compared with $17.7m in the same period in 1999.

The earnings were once again above the official forecasts by analysts.

The profit performance adds some support to technology and internet related companies which have seen their share prices tumble in recent days.

Yahoo, like Microsoft and Amazon, is the sort of giant of the wired world investors hope their fledgling start-ups will become.

Growth beat expectations

Unlike many internet firms, including online department store Amazon, Yahoo has managed to turn its high sales and usage levels into profits.

Yahoo said its total sales in the first quarter were $228.4m, up from $103.9m last year.

Meanwhile the number of page views to its sites rocketed to an average 625 million per day in March, up from 465 million in December.

The strong growth in page views, up 34% in three months, was a positive surprise to some analysts who had forecast the company would only achieve single-digit growth.

Yahoo said that much of the growth came from overseas. In Japan alone, it now has 14 million users, and its total global audience now numbers 145 million.

New finance chief

"Our results in the first quarter continue to demonstrate that we have created a global service that resonates with users and a business with inherent self-reinforcing scale from which strong financial results can be derived," chief executive Tim Koogle said in a statement.

The company said much of its plans for future growth involve distributing its content to wireless devices like cellphones.

It said its auctions service surpassed 2.5 million daily listings in the quarter, up from 1.5 million in December.

Yahoo also named Susan Decker, global head of research at brokerage Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, as its new chief financial officer, replacing Gary Valenzuela, who will retire in July.