eBay held its 2009 Analyst Day today with CEO John Donahoe speaking on the company’s future. As anticipated, a great deal of focus was put on PayPal.
A bit more interesting is that Donahoe says that eBay is no longer an online auctions company, nor a retail company. He says it’s “an eCommerce platoform provider with a simple, unified vision: to connect buyers and sellers.” eBay is focusing on the “secondary market.”
The eBay Ink blog quotes him on what he said about the company’s Skype business:
“When we bought Skype,” he said. “We were wrong. We thought it would reduce friction in commerce and payments.” He went on to say that we’re done apologizing for Skype. It’s a great business that is well positioned as a communications leader.
PayPal President Scott Thompson says that PayPal expects to double in size by 2011. He said they expect to process 14% of global ecommerce transactions.
The mobile market likely plays a significant role in this grand scheme. “Like most online companies, PayPal has plans for the mobile market,” Peter Burrows at BusinessWeek recently noted. “The company just announced a new hook-up with Research In Motion (RIMM) that makes PayPal an option for buying apps for BlackBerry devices. And for the future, Stephenson says, they are also working on ways to make PayPal available on billions of lower-end phones that lack Net access—even phones owned by people who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts.”
Time will tell if PayPal lives up to its own expectations. eBay is already opening up to more PayPal-like services though checks and money orders are still apparently out of the question.
