Forbes 100 Fastest Growing Companies

august 22, 2005

Check out the Forbes 100 Fastest Growing Companies, in which Yahoo! tops the list. From the article that accompanied the list: Perhaps the biggest story, though, is Yahoo. Five years ago the Internet search engine was tech-wreck roadkill, its stock in free fall from $119 to an eventual low of $4 a share. Today Yahoo is the hottest company in America, claiming the top spot among our 100 speedsters. (The rankings are based on three years of results, so that other thriving Internet concern, Google, won’t be eligible until 2008.) Yahoo’s return from the land of the dot-com dead has been well documented in this magazine. CEO Terry Semel wooed back the big advertising agencies Yahoo’s old management had brashly tried to bypass. Meanwhile, the proliferation of broadband Internet access and a widening array of Yahoo content made it possible for advertisers to target Yahoo’s 120 million monthly visitors in ever more sophisticated ways. The result has been a transformation of online advertising as well as of Yahoo’s bottom line: Earnings and revenues have soared 185% and 78% a year, respectively, over the past three years. And Yahoo now has a business model it thinks it can apply globally. Witness its $1 billion investment in Chinese web-search and e-commerce company Alibaba.com. The loser in the Alibaba bidding was No. 35, eBay, which suffered a blow to its own China ambitions.


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