Panama News Warms Yahoo!

Updated from 7:37 a.m. EST

Shares of Yahoo! (YHOO) rose early Wednesday as investors applauded news that the long-awaited Panama ad system would debut ahead of schedule on Feb. 5.

Shares rose 6.1%, or $1.66, to $28.62 in spite of a soft first-quarter forecast and a Wednesday morning downgrade from Goldman Sachs. It cut the stock to neutral from buy, citing limited upside for the shares given the company's growth rate and competitive challenges.

The new system, a centerpiece of the company's strategy, is intended to help Yahoo! close the gap in the amount of money it makes per search compared with rival Google(GOOG).

While the launch was already delayed once, it allowed Yahoo! to make sure it would work as smoothly as possible, Yahoo! CFO Sue Decker said in the company's conference call to investors.

"The extra time we took in testing and in deliberate client migration delayed the implementation, but we felt that doing it right was more important than doing it right away and the positive feedback we're getting from clients tells us this was the right decision," she said. Decker added that Panama was built modularly, or in a way that will make it easy for Yahoo! to tie in new features and increase its capabilities in the future.

The stock recently climbed 5.9% in after-hours trading to $28.55.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company said Tuesday it made $269 million, or 19 cents a share, for the quarter ended Dec. 31. That's compared with $683 million, or 46 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue rose to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion a year earlier.