During its conference call for the company’s earnings announcement, Microsoft’s chief financial officer said the time-honored practice of acquiring companies could play into the company’s online advertising strategy.
Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell seems to have discounted those $80 billion-for-Yahoo rumors while addressing a question about online advertising. If they do spend on that sector, it won’t be a massive cash outlay, the Wall Street Journal noted:
In response to a question about Microsoft’s plans in the on-line advertising market after losing the battle for Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX) AOL to Google Inc. (GOOG), Liddell said that Microsoft is “willing to consider acquisitions to fuel growth.”
He said the company tends to prefer smaller targets in keeping with recent activity and declined to comment further.
Microsoft corporate vice president Scott Di Valerio said that the company was investing heavily in Internet arm MSN, especially in search (adding image and news queries) and its transition to its advertising platform adCenter.
Fourth quarter numbers from the world’s biggest tech company listed record revenue, which Microsoft attributed to several product launches during the period.
Microsoft disclosed revenue of $11.84 billion, a record for the company, during its fourth quarter of 2005. Net income also increased year-over-year for the period to $3.65 billion, up 5 percent from 2004.
The company also noted in a statement it had returned more than $8.5 billion to shareholders during the quarter, by issuing dividends and repurchasing stock.
Dividends had been a sticking point for Microsoft investors, who believed some of the famed Redmond cash pile needed to be returned to them. The company only began issuing dividends a couple of years ago.
Cash still finds its way into Microsoft’s bank account, with the Xbox 360 and the arrival of products like SQL Server 2005:
“The growth in our core businesses was healthy during the quarter driven by strength in Server and Tools and the success of our Windows Client products in a robust PC market,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer of Microsoft. “The quarter also marked the beginning of an important product cycle for Microsoft with the launches of Xbox 360, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, all of which were extremely successful and well received by our customers.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
