Wall Street Journal | January 25, 2011 | Juro Osawa
TOKYO—Yahoo Japan Corp. said Tuesday its net profit for the October-December quarter rose 19% from a year earlier amid solid growth in advertising revenue, and said its planned search-technology tie-up with Google Inc. is moving ahead smoothly.
The operator of Japan’s most popular Internet portal site, which drew protests over fair competition from rival businesses and advertisers last year after it announced a plan to use Google’s technology for internet searches and search-linked advertising, said its group net profit for the fiscal second quarter rose to 24.7 billion yen ($299.4 million) from 20.8 billion yen a year earlier.
The figure was above the forecast range of 21.7 billion yen to 23.1 billion yen that the company issued in October.
Microsoft Corp. and online shopping-mall operator Rakuten Inc. filed petitions with Japan’s Fair Trade Commission to investigate the tie-up with Google after Yahoo Japan unveiled its plan in July. But the FTC in effect gave a green light to the alliance last month, saying that its investigation had so far found no problems under antitrust rules.
A Japan FTC official said Tuesday that the commission’s stance hasn’t changed since last month, but added that the FTC would keep monitoring the situation.
Yahoo Japan adopted Google’s technology for its Web searches last month, and plans to incorporate the U.S. company’s technology into its search-linked ad services by this summer. The company has said that its criteria for displaying search results will remain independent from Google’s, even if it uses the latter’s technology to run its searches.
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