Investors clearly don’t like what they see with eBay, which reported its fourth-quarter earnings today — sending shares down around 10% in extended trading.
The company said it had earnings of 50 cents per share on revenue of $2.3 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of 50 cents a share on revenue of $2.32 billion. Net revenue hardly changed from the same quarter last year, and gross merchandise volume remained basically unchanged as well. In order to continue growing its business, it needs those numbers to keep going up, and that’s something that investors are clearly paying close attention.
What that could signal was a weaker holiday quarter — which is crucial for e-commerce companies — than what people were hoping.
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eBay split from PayPal last year, essentially turning it into a new company without the payments service buoying it. Since the split, the company’s shares have performed so-so. The company’s services didn’t grow, but they didn’t decline, either.
There are probably a lot of additional forces at play in tech across the board, including what might be a lighter holiday season and major negative macroeconomic trends. But it still seems that what eBay is doing isn’t what investors are looking for, as the company increasingly competes with companies like Amazon.
And if you’re competing with Amazon, you need the amount of things people are selling — or at least, the amount of money you’re making off your total sales — to keep going up.
(Update: Added some additional clarification around the performance of the stock, including a correction regarding the company’s Q2 stock drop related to the PayPal spinoff.)