Dive Brief:
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eBay on Wednesday reported its second quarter earnings, beating analysts' forcasts for the second straight quarter, sending its stock up more than 5% in after-hours trading.
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eBay posted earnings at an adjusted 43 cents per share, exceeding forecasts for 42 cents per share. The auction and marketplace site reported $2.23 billion in revenue, beating expectations for $2.17 billion. In addition, eBay raised its fiscal year revenue guidance to between $8.85 billion and $8.95 billion.
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eBay's ticket-sales unit StubHub also continues to grow, with revenue up 40% year over year to $225 million.
Dive Insight:
Many observers predicted trouble for eBay when its PayPal payment unit spun off last year. But as eBay moves squarely from an auction-oriented site to more of a direct-sales, fixed-price marketplace competing more directly with the likes of Amazon, the company has shown signs of new life. Its shares have risen 9% in the last three months.
During the second quarter, eBay's live listings eclipsed the one billion milestone for the first time. The company also acquired machine learning startups Expertmaker and SalesPredict.
“Q2 was another good quarter where we delivered strong results and had acceleration in growth,” President and CEO Devin Wenig said in a statement. “We are now one year into executing our strategy to provide the best choice, the most relevance and the most powerful selling platform, and there are signs of momentum in our business. We continue to invest in our platforms to ensure eBay is a global commerce leader for years to come.”
eBay is also taking steps to improve its mobile efforts. Earlier this month, the company began to leverage Google’s open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages framework to deliver faster browsing experiences on mobile devices. AMP enables rich content like video, animations and graphics to load instantaneously and simultaneously. While publishers like the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have adopted AMP for content-heavy news articles, eBay is one of the first retailers to embrace the technology.