eBay Reports Strong Q4 Earnings led by Europe, PayPal

[mandy]

Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy wrote that his firm's count of eBay's fourth-quarter listings suggests that they will be 8% to 11% below his estimates. Rashtchy says the shortfall in listings could cause eBay, which announces earnings on Jan. 24, to miss Wall Street revenue estimates by $50 million to $70 million.

Total listings would be in the range of 578 million to 590 million, as opposed to Piper Jaffray's prior estimate of 693 million.

Piper Jaffray also revised its 2008 revenue estimate to $8.14 billion, or about $568 million below Wall Street's consensus estimates, according to analysts surveyed by Thomson/First Call. Rashtchy wrote that fee increases announced last week that will take effect at the end of January may hurt the company. "Recent price increases are likely to be passed on to buyers, further depressing buyer activity," ...

full article: http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/newsan...en=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

[BellisimaJ.]

Duh. We've been telling them that since last July. :

[dimucci]

The first quarter isn't off to a good start

Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post, meanwhile, wrote in a note to clients that core listings were off to a slow start for the new year. Listings were virtually flat, picking up only 0.3% compared with the year prior. And eBay's listings in Germany were down 4% year over year.

[mandy]

In the last week as the dust has settled on Q4, an interesting divide has started to become apparent amongst the Wall St. analysts that follow eBay. I spent some time this weekend reading most of the preview reports and it seems the main area where the firms differ in their viewpoint is not on the listing counts which they all admit were not as robust as they hoped (anywhere from 5-15% below expectations), but in the revenue generated from those listings.

The mid-point of eBay's transaction revenue guidance is $1.052b and this is the part Wall St. is watching very closely.  Of course the performance of PayPal and Skype will play a factor, but all eyes are on the core business and it's corresponding revenue.

This is oddly similar to the 2004 Q4 season when signs of eBay's slowing first came to light when Q4 results failed to delight and the company's stock was hit very hard and hasn't really recovered since...

full article: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...t_div.html

[mandy]

EBay Inc. is expected to report higher earnings per share and a surge in sales Wednesday, fueled by growth in its PayPal online payment processing business and higher average selling prices for items sold on its Web sites...

Sales are seen climbing 25% to $1.67 billion...

The advances will be enough, for now, to offset ongoing weakness in eBay's core auctions business...

full article: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/ea...EE0E044%7D

[mandy]

Q4 earnings are out:

Shares of EBay Inc., the world's largest online auctioneer, rose after the company boosted its full-year profit forecast and posted a 24 percent fourth- quarter profit gain, spurred by growth in Europe.

The retailer, based in San Jose, California, also said it will repurchase as much as $2 billion in additional stock.

Overseas revenue growth outpaced U.S. sales because of a boost in overall demand from German buyers and a strong U.K. holiday season...

Listings increased 12 percent...

full article: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a85hcSQyRERo&refer=us

Investors gave their blessing to eBay's turnaround Wednesday, sending the stock of the San Jose auctioneer soaring after it trounced Wall Street's expectations for the second quarter in a row.

Not only were revenue and earnings more robust than analysts had anticipated, but eBay also expanded its operating margin and accelerated the growth of the total value of items sold on its marketplace...

full article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16541684.htm

- Piper Jaffray says that while eBay produced a strong quarter with upside to their estimates, the majority of the upside came from foreign exchange.

Listing growth has slowed considerably (12% y/ y); while monetization improved to $1.75 (ex forex) in Q4 from $1.65 in Q3, it failed to reach firm's target of $1.80. Unclear how much of the monetization improvement was Q4 seasonality...

Usage growth continues to decelerate as active users increased only 14% y/ y in Q4, down from 17% in Q3, and at 82M was 2M below the 84M necessary to stabilize this metric. GMV growth (ex forex) flattened to 16% y/y growth, and likely benefited from higher ASPs in the quarter...

full article: http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/25095

eBay President and CEO Meg Whitman said eBay listings are in better balance, and the actions they took to shift the balance back to "core" from "Store" had the desired effect...

The number of eBay Stores at quarter's end, for the past five quarters, are as follows:
Q4-05: 383,000
Q1-06: 486,000 (27% increase)
Q2-06: 541,000 (11% increase)
Q3-06: 573,000 (6% increase)
Q4-06: 593,000 (3% increase)

The percentage of eBay Stores hosted internationally went from 45% as of December 31, 2005, to 56% as of December 31, 2006...

full article: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m01/i25/s01

[mandy]

Channel Advisor CEO Scott Wingo provides some analysis of eBay's Q4 earnings on his blog:

Listings and $/listing

While listings were up only 11% y/y (only 4% domestically!), the store/core mix moved the way eBay wanted when they did the rebalancing.  Store listings grew much slower at 27% y/y (vs. 85% in Q3)  and now 74% of listings are stores, down from 77% in Q3 and 83% in Q2. I've often thought that the rebalancing would push listings off the site totally (to seller's ecomm sites) and the fact that the store listings aren't going to core seems to prove that theory

One metric Wall St. is watching very closely is the revenue per listing.  This chart illustrates the trends with listings and $/listing since 2002.  Notice the dip that started in Q405 and continued until Q3/Q4 06.  While eBay's listing growth has slowed, they are generating more $/listing.  GMV/listing grew 9% and it has been flat for several Q's...

full article: http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_str...esult.html

[chiquita]

Could this be why eBay is focusing on the buyer?

There are two areas that are still showing concerning trends.  The first is registered users.  There are several metrics here.  You have confirmed registered users (CRUs) and active registered users (ARUs).  CRUs and ARU growth rates continued to slow and the gap between the two continued to widen.  CRUs are growing at 23%  y/y and ARUs are growing at 14% y/y.  Unfortunately active users as a percentage of registered continued its slide.  This indicates that eBay is losing active users faster than it's adding them.

This is what I suspected, even my active use of ebay is way down. I think that buyers got tired of fraud, and are now buying from established companies and independent sites. The buyers are not shopping at the small auction venues in enough numbers for those sites to survive.