eBay goes hot on India, China trail as US growth slows

[mandy]

Despite the impressive stats, eBay’s growth in its most established market, the US, is slowing down. It is trying to push hard into China with a $100m promotion budget and is looking for new growth markets, including India. It bought bazee.com, India’s biggest online market place, in ’04. Now eBay has 1.7m registered users in India.

Meg Whitman, president and CEO, eBay Inc, will soon be making her first visit to India.  In an exclusive pre-visit interview, Ms Whitman, who has been running eBay since 1998, talks about the growth of the online marketplace, trading services on eBay, its recent acquisition, Skype, and opportunities in India...

full article:  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/arti...420754.cms

[xppman]

Yes Meg must push forward as there are many suckers left in the world to squeeze.

[mandy]

Since we are focused on e-commerce, that’s the area we know best. What I can tell you is that the Internet is changing the way people buy and sell and, given its rapid growth in India, we see enormous opportunity for buyers and sellers here. We’re focused on working with our local community of buyers and sellers to make eBay India an even more vibrant marketplace for trade. We think that with increased broadband penetration, more people will latch on to this concept. The Indian community is enthusiastic about the benefits they find on eBay and as e-commerce grows in India, I’m sure eBay will too...

Now more than half of our registered users and the gross merchandise sales they generate come from outside the US. While our top international marketplaces at the moment are Germany, the UK and South Korea; China and India will undoubtedly become strong e-commerce markets over time.

full article: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story....t_id=88472

eBay looks to Asia for growth

Online auction company eBay said it expects the number of Asia-Pacific users trading on its site to eventually outstrip that for the U.S. and Europe as Internet penetration grows, but it also predicts imminent competition.

More than 30 million of the company's 181 million registered users worldwide are in the Asia-Pacific region, Chief Executive Meg Whitman said Thursday.

"These are still small markets, but as Internet usage and broadband penetration increase, we see these markets growing bigger than our top markets currently," she said.

full article:  http://news.com.com/eBay+looks+to+Asia+f...42686.html