These Companies Are Benefiting From Different Areas of Mobile Technology

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Aug 21, 2014

Technology is moving at a fast pace, and different companies are benefiting from it in different ways. For example, Yahoo! (YHOO, Financial) and Nuance (NUAN, Financial) are focusing on different areas to benefit from mobile growth. Let's take a look at the prospects of both companies.

Nuance's moves

Mobile smartphones and tablets are increasingly and rapidly becoming the leading devices for interacting with enterprise applications, and Oracle has led the way through Nuance broad set of mobile apps. Oracle in collaboration with Nuance is also leading the way in using speech interfaces to make it easier and more natural to interact with enterprise solutions.

Nuance envisions a workplace in which employees will be able to utilize state-of-the-art voice and language understanding capabilities to access and use enterprise applications in mobile environments by providing the same or even better efficiency as through their desktops. Nuance is believed to significantly cut employee learning curves and improve productivity for mobile users by leveraging voice technologies.

Nuance cloud solutions enable more human-like speech recognition experiences for nearly any device and platform, in more than 40 languages with proven technology, leadership and unsurpassed speech experience.

Nuance's tie-up with Oracle promises to deliver groundbreaking capabilities to the Enterprise by using speech to deliver rapid access to information within Oracle solutions, to make it easier to place information into those systems. There’s limitless future for transformative employee experiences and for improved quality, velocity and simplicity of enterprise information exchanged between employees and their organizations.

What about Yahoo!

Moreover, Yahoo! has accelerated its attempts to bring in new updates to its apps by 35%. Yahoo is holding a competitive advantage of releasing more updates than its peers in the market. Mobile mail has also seen strong growth, with 15% quarter-over-quarter growth in daily active users.

Also, the Yahoo! app is enjoying great traction in the news and ad category. Yahoo! app is rated number one on Apple’s app store and second at Google Play. This is great news for the company. The success is so good that Yahoo’s Active users tripled since its launch. Moreover, the weather app has also performed strongly.

Yahoo! is indeed focusing much on growth of its mobile segment. With this growth Yahoo! is strengthening its long-term prospects. Seeing about 100% growth across every segment in the mobile search business has lifted its spirits high so it is investing aggressively on mobile search to explore it more.

In the coming quarter, Yahoo! is in position for investing and strengthening the mail platform. Another impressive move by the company was that Yahoo! announced a partnership with Vevo with which it got access to a large collection of music videos, with more than 90,000 in total which will help Yahoo! to make its presence felt on other platforms as well. Also, it had launched Yahoo! Screen on Apple TV late last year, and this quarter, it launched Yahoo! Screen on Roku.

Valuation and conclusion

Yahoo! is riding a roller coaster, improving everywhere in every segment and is expected to go even further in terms of its performance. Looking at the ratios, Yahoo! also seems promising. It has a trailing P/E of 30 with a forward P/E of 20, which indicates there is much room for Yahoo’s earnings to grow. Analysts are also expecting Yahoo’s prospects to be strong. Moreover, the same can be said about Nuance, as the company executes a change in the business model. So, investors should keep a closer eye on both companies for the long run.