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 华尔街日报：在中国遭遇巨大挑战 EBAY准备全线撤退 |
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valley
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作者：valley 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
Trouble seems to be following eBay, even as far as China.
Late last month, the chief executive of eBay's Chinese unit, Eachnet, resigned abruptly. EBay also is in talks to sell part or all of its Chinese operations to Hutchison Whampoa's media flagship, Tom Group, which provides wireless-communications services, according to several Chinese newspapers. While a Tom Online spokeswoman and an eBay spokesman declined to comment on any possible discussions, such a sale would be a setback for eBay, which invested $100 million last year to further its ambitions in China.
A deal would foster the perception among stock-market investors of "how difficult and challenging the China market has been for them," says Citigroup Global Markets analyst Mark Mahaney, who has a "buy" rating on eBay. "It would be perceived as a negative." Citigroup owns eBay shares and has conducted investment-banking business with eBay in the past 12 months.
China is just the latest woe for eBay, once a star of e-commerce. Over the past few years, the San Jose, Calif., company's growth has slowed and new competitors have emerged. Today, the Internet company is working to stabilize its flagship U.S. auction business -- its largest sales generator -- which has matured and is now producing less revenue per listing. EBay says listings by on-site "stores," which generate less in fees, were rising faster than auction listings and notes that merchants were selling too much look-alike or commodity items such as DVDs or CDs, which make the buying experience less unique and enticing.
EBay is tweaking its flagship site. It raised fees in August to motivate merchants to list more items for sale by auction, rather than in their stores.
The recent China news also shows how global the e-commerce company's business has become, and how difficult that is to manage. International markets offer eBay a chance to expand its audience and accelerate its revenue and profit. EBay has aggressively entered markets overseas in the past few years because it was late behind rival Yahoo in exploiting the lucrative Japanese online-auction market, which eBay left in 2002.
In Asia, eBay has concentrated on China and South Korea. China is crucial because it is the world's second-largest Internet market by users behind the U.S. EBay completed an acquisition of Chinese online auction company EachNet for $150 million in 2003, after making an initial investment of $30 million in 2002. The company also bought a majority stake in Internet Auction Co. in Korea for $120 million in 2001, and then bought the remainder for about $362 million in 2004.
But the international drive isn't going smoothly, especially as more local rivals materialize. In the past year, eBay lost its top position in China's and South Korea's online-auction markets, according to analysts and some market research. In China, it now ranks second to closely held Alibaba.com's TaoBao unit. Yahoo paid about $1 billion for a 40% stake in Alibaba last year. TaoBao had 67% of the Chinese auction market for the first six months of the year, compared with eBay Eachnet's 29%, according to China Internet Network Information Centre, a quasigovernmental agency.
TaoBao has eaten into eBay's market share by allowing users to list sale items without a fee, whereas eBay typically charged for such listings. In the past year, eBay has lowered or waived several listing fees in China, such as store-listing fees, in order to compete. EBay's listings in China have decelerated from 300% year-over-year growth in 2005's fourth quarter to 127% year-over-year growth in the third quarter of this year, estimates John Aiken, an analyst at research firm Majestic Research.
Chinese Internet users say eBay has been slower than TaoBao to introduce new applications and new payment services and some users consider its site less "friendly" than TaoBao's, according to Duncan Clark, chairman of consulting and research firm BDA (China).
EBay faces a similar challenge in South Korea, where its subsidiary, Internet Auction, now lags behind local competitor Gmarket. Gmarket, which boasts Yahoo as a minority investor, unseated eBay earlier this year in terms of revenue by using a savvier product mix and more aggressive pricing, Citigroup's Mr. Mahaney says.
The mediocre showings overseas may have eaten into eBay's stock price. Overall, eBay shares have declined more than 30% since the start of this year. Its price/earnings ratio of 40.60 is more expensive than the Nasdaq 100 Index's multiple of 34 and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock Index's 18. Yahoo's multiple, in comparison, is less costly at 30. As of 4 p.m. composite trading yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, eBay shares were down 48 cents at $29.10 each.
EBay spokesman Hani Durzy says the company is "very happy" with its business in China and believes it is "well positioned" to succeed there over the next five to 10 years. Mr. Durzy adds that Martin Wu, the recently departed head of eBay's Chinese unit Eachnet, completed the tenure that he had been scheduled to be at the company. Mr. Wu is being succeeded by Jeff Liao, the head of eBay's electronic-payments business China.
Mr. Durzy also says eBay's Chinese site is comparable -- if not better than -- rivals' sites, because eBay offers communications tools such as Skype Internet-calling technology and its PayPal online payment services. EBay also developed products and introduced features to improve the safety of the Chinese site last year, which slowed some of the site's growth, he says.
作者：valley 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 华尔街日报：在中国遭遇巨大挑战 EBAY准备全线撤退 -- valley - (5695 Byte) 2006-10-12 周四, 13:45 (2907 reads)
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