Internet giant Yahoo has pushed its mobile platform to another nine countries, taking its service offering to a total of 17 countries worldwide across more than 400 devices. Yahoo Mobile is now available via operators in Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Italy. Featuring customisable home pages and localised content, Yahoo Mobile for Web and the Yahoo Mobile iPhone app (available via Apple’s App Store) first debuted across eight countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, India, Indonesia and the Philippines in April this year. The company plans to launch additional localised versions over the next several months. 

By making its mobile homepage more user-friendly, the company hopes that Yahoo Mobile will be a hub for handset users to access their favourite sites and services. Yahoo is aiming to use mobile as a platform to help it battle rival Google. Despite Google’s higher profile, shares of Yahoo are seeing a strong run-up this year and the company’s stock price has soared by more than 33 percent since the beginning of the year. An analyst for Citigroup, however, thinks the Web portal is still being undervalued by the market and could also be a takeover target. Mark Mahaney of Citigroup this week upgraded the stock to a ‘buy’ with a US$21 price target – the highest such target among Wall Street analysts covering the stock.