Carol Bartz spent much of her first year as Yahoo Inc.’s chief executive rallying the troops and clearing the decks, often sounding like a salty drill sergeant as she vowed to whip the downtrodden Internet company back into shape.
For all the tough talk, Yahoo remains on shaky ground as Bartz marks her one-year anniversary as CEO on Wednesday.
Revenue has sagged even further since her hiring while Yahoo’s share of the Internet lucrative search market has shriveled and the company’s stock performance has lagged its most prominent peers.
“Operationally, I don’t think you can point to any meaningful success yet, although you can point to some good strategic moves,” said Benchmark Co. analyst Clayton Moran.
Yahoo declined a request to interview Bartz.
Bartz’s most notable accomplishment so far has been negotiating an Internet search partnership with rival Microsoft Corp., resolving a tense courtship that began under her predecessors.
Moran and other analysts have higher hopes for Bartz in her second year at the helm, largely because they believe a recovering economy will help Yahoo sell more online advertising and bounce back from its sharpest annual revenue decline in eight years.
Yahoo’s fourth-quarter results aren’t due out until Jan. 26, but management has projected an 11 percent drop in its 2009 revenue.
Convinced the worst is over, Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Scott Kessler rates Yahoo as his top Internet stock pick for this year, even though he says Yahoo’s financial results so far under Bartz have been “consistently disappointing.”
Bartz, 61, can’t be entirely blamed for the letdown because Yahoo’s profits depend on advertising, a business that suffered as marketers curtailed their spending during the worst U.S. recession in 70 years.
Yahoo’s financial funk began in 2006 while Terry Semel was still CEO and deepened even further when company co-founder Jerry Yang took over the top job in June…