YAHOO!! WOMEN POWER PROPELS ITS GROWTH??!!

Yahoo Inc. moved further down the road to recovery in the fourth quarter as online advertising began to snap out of a yearlong stupor to ease the Internet company's long-running slump.

The results released Tuesday represented Yahoo's best performance since the company hired Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz as chief executive a year ago. Bartz has been vowing since her arrival to engineer a turnaround that eluded her two predecessors, Terry Semel and Jerry Yang.

Yahoo promised to deliver even more meaningful progress to start this year. Management projected its revenue would rise about 3 percent to $1.63 billion during the January-March period, ending five consecutive quarters of decline.

Yahoo earned $153 million, or 11 cents per share, during the final three months of 2009, rebounding from a loss of $303 million, or 22 cents per share, in the prior year.

If not for charges for internal reshuffling and a proposed search partnership with Microsoft Corp., Yahoo said it would have made 15 cents per share in the quarter. That topped the average estimate of 11 cents per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Yahoo shares climbed 45 cents, or 2.8 percent, in extended trading. Before the results came out, the stock ended Tuesday's regular session at $15.99, up 13 cents.

Revenue remained in a rut during the latest quarter, slipping 4 percent to $1.73 billion. By contrast, Google's fourth-quarter revenue surged 17 percent. Yahoo still did better than the first nine months of 2009, when the company's revenue dropped 12 percent

So is Carol Bartz, the new Carly Fiorina of Yahoo Inc..??!! Only time will tell........

Here it is pertinent to note that Fiorina, is an American businesswoman (and who was mired in a number of controversies), is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard. She served at HP from 1999 to 2005. Previously she was as an executive vice president at AT&T, where she coordinated the spinoff and initial public offering of Lucent.