eBay Q3 Earnings Beats Expectations Following Its Split From PayPal

eBay reported its third-quarter earnings today — its first as a separate company from PayPal — and beat investor expectations with earnings of 43 cents per share and $2.1 billion in revenue. Investors were looking for $2.09 billion in revenue and earnings of 40 cents per share.

The report sent eBay shares straight up, with the company’s stock rising 9 percent in extended trading. In the second quarter this year, eBay’s standalone revenue was $2.11 billion, and in the same quarter last year the company’s revenue was $2.15 billion. Prior to the earnings report, shares of eBay were up around 2.5 percent on the year.

Still, the numbers are not as good as the prior year. Revenue was down 2 percent year-over-year, and the company’s earnings per share fell 6 percent year-over-year. The company reported GMV of $19.6 billion, compared to GMV of about $20 billion in the same quarter the year earlier. eBay isalso selling off its enterprise unit, essentially splitting off both PayPal and eBay enterprise as part of the company’s earnings report.

Taken together, this essentially pegs eBay’s core services as a stable, but not necessarily exciting business in terms of growth. The company unveiled a new version of its app in September this year with a more unified mobile experience. At the time, the company’s apps had been downloaded 279 million times.

As expected eBay faces increasingly stiff challenges from selling competitors like Amazon, but it does seem like investors are showing a little bit of faith in the company’s core business model. For the next quarter, the company is forecasting $2.275 billion to $2.325 billion in revenue, and earnings of between 47 cents and 49 cents per share.This is eBay’s first quarter reporting separately from PayPal, a big bellwether moment for the company as it returns to its roots as a selling platform. PayPal started trading in July earlier this year, and at the time immediately popped around 8 percent in trading on its first day as an independent, publicly traded company.

Comments

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

The CC Aurora is actually pretty fun, as far as projectors go

I don’t review projectors. Projectors are boring. Even the good ones. They remind me of vacation slideshows and the film strips we had to watch in health class — neither of which I’m in a particular hurry to revisit in my adult life. That said, I’ve always harbored some germ of a notion that some day I might buy one, to compensate for being one of those weirdos without a TV set. There’s something undeniably appealing about a big screen TV you can break out during movie night and then stash back into the closest of your one-bedroom New York City apartment. XGIMI’s CC Aurora is the closest I’ve seen to fitting the bill — or, for that matter, being a projector that I could actually muster any reasonable amount of excitement about. From the looks of it, it’s kind of the perfect package for the apartment dweller: it’s compact, self-contained with a built-in speaker system and plays nicely with mobile devices. Clearly I’m not alone here, either. The product scored $170,000 on Indi...

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Here’s how to keep track of Elon Musk’s Roadster and Starman in space

Elon Musk’s Starman, the mannequin driver of the Tesla Roadster SpaceX launched aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket, is taking a trip around our solar system, in a large elliptical orbit that will bring him relatively close to Mars, the Sun and other heavenly bodies. But how to track the trip, now that the Roadster’s onboard batteries are out of juice and no longer transmitting live footage? Thanks to the work of Ben Pearson, a SpaceX fan and electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, who created ‘Where is Roadster,’ a website that makes use of JPL Horizons data to track the progress of the Roadster and Starman through space, and to predict its path and let you know when it’ll come close to meeting up with various planets and the Sun. The website tells you the Roadster’s current position, too, as well as its speed and whether it’s moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at any given moment. It’s not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, but it is something Elon...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog