eBay losing another key director: someone who 'matters'

Greg is a brilliant guy and also one of the good people in the industry. I wish him well. Is the eBay brain drain more severe than it appears?

i would like the opinion of other ebay owners, if they feel the stock can go up at this price of 28.25

Maybe he is the smart one who jumps ship when it springs a leak. Better to jump than go down with the ship.

So not only is eBay losing its sellers and buyers, its now losing more of it's top staff. People are the most important asset to any company, though you could say that Bill and Meg are perhaps exceptions to that rule!

Outsiders digging around in ebays business, sounds to me like they are getting desperate to try and hold on to their advantage. The principal advantage eBay has or should I say had, was it's size, and public awareness. It has now become too big and arrogant that it feels it can ignore its users (sellers) and public awareness is that it is no longer a particularly safe place to trade with all the scams and fraud. With it's reputation in tatters I would be looking for an exit strategy along with the sellers if I was an eBay employee. Are there enough lifebelts to go round.

Sellers Sellers and bashers. If you understand anything about technology companies particularly in maturing businesses it's natural for people to leave and move on. I have worked in the technology business for 15 years. It's nothing new and nothing to panick about. Get a grip. I have never seen such a negative and unobjective blog.

To My Fellow Long Value Investors: (from a friend who posted in another forum responding to negative attacks and nay sayers on ebay)

Remember that spaghetti sauce commercial from the 1970s – I think it was for prego sauce where the mother keeps asking –do they have garlic and the answer was “its in here”….what about onions..? ”Its in there” Well “its in there” is the answer to every point you have brought up all year. In other words its all factored in the stock price and then some.


Let me explain to you why I'm looking forward to ebays next two or three earning reports. Ebays is set to show 30% growth in revenue this year. Todays stock price is assuming that ebay can grow at 30% for ONE YEAR more and then 4% only FOREVER.

Now, 4% forever for ebay is the equivalent of NO GROWTH for most companies because ebay has enough pricing power in both its monopolistic auction business and paypal to raise prices this much per year easily. So the market is saying after this year – no more growth. Think about this.

Well it will be very interesting to see ebay put up 30% growth numbers for another quarter or two or three – eventually the revenue and cash flow numbers are going to be so high in a few more quarters that the market is going to go nuts – there is no way it will be able to hold the stock price down to this level much longer if those kind of growth numbers are met in the next two quarters (and they are easily going to hit those numbers this quarter)

So when you talk about the negatives, they are meaningless without reflecting that against the stock price which I have not seen you do.

Yes, ebays growth is slowing in the US – but the stock price is more than reflecting this. What many growth lovers never comprehend is that this slowing growth is actually a VERY POSITIVE thing when the stock price has fallen to a level that reflects low growth. The reason why is that once ebay saturates its market it can declare itself KING. In a saturated market its going to be very hard for another company to take any share from ebay. An expanding high growth market is nice- but it allows competitors to move in more easily and capture parts of the growing market – (see ebays experience in Korea as an example of this) So to a value investor, seeing that the markets are getting saturated makes you more sure that the revenues from the source are secure. You adjust down the growth numbers in your models but the model is more likely to be precise for the reasons explained and as long as the stock price is low enough, then these can be very lucrative situations for investing.

What is also often forgotten with all the focus on core listings is that paypal is a large part of this company. I suspect paypal will eventually be larger that the auction business – but because the company name is ebay, everyone is focused on the auctions – make sure you consider all revenue sourse both present and future when valuing the company.

Now please make a point that won't elicit the answer “its in there”

Need I say more?

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I wish the best of luck to him. He probably had pretty good reasons to leave such a giant as eBay. And Malody's comment on this article could be very true. Many people have left ebay including buyers and sellers. But guess what, I think this is where everyone is going http://www.oltiby.com Online auctions site in reverse. Auction place where you can save bunch of money as a buyer. See you there.