With few exceptions, tech companies that get tagged with the dinosaur label have a hard time shaking it. Executives at eBay are making a concerted effort to keep their company off the list.
In Mar. 11 presentations for Wall Street analysts at the company’s San Jose [Calif.] headquarters, eBay executives detailed plans to increase revenue in the coming years. “This business has continued to fall short of our expectations and customers’ expectations,” said eBay CEO John Donahoe, the former Bain & Co. consultant who took over the top job from Meg Whitman last year. “That’s not acceptable. The eBay you knew is not the eBay of today or the eBay of the future.”
To back up the talk, Donahoe and others spelled out a laundry list of internal changes and specific plans both to improve the auction site and increasingly to focus on other businesses. The overall goal: to create a one-stop shop where customers can make purchases in a wide variety of ways — from bidding in auctions to clicking on ads, scanning classifieds, or making outright purchases. And he promised the site would be easier to use, offer even better deals, and provide a more satisfying experience. “The ‘buyer beware’ experience has run its course,” Donahoe said.
Some investors are giving eBay the benefit of the doubt. The company’s shares rose 4.8 percent, to 11.63, on Mar. 11. “EBay did a respectable job of trying to reposition investors’ view onto components of their business that have the most long-term growth,” says Stifel Nicolaus analyst Scott Devitt. Still, the company faces long-term challenges, Devitt says.
Slow to Adapt in the Past
Adding to the credibility was some surprising frankness about the mistakes of the past. Time and again, executives admitted what most investors had long known — that the company spent years sitting on…