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Transcript
OP
Operator
Operator
Good day ladies and gentlemen welcome to the eBay's second quarter 2015 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, there will be a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tom Hudson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.
TR
Tom G. Hudson - Vice President-Investor Relations
Management
Good morning. Thank you for joining us and welcome to eBay earnings release conference call for the second quarter of 2015. Joining me today on the call are John Donahoe, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Bob Swan, our Chief Financial Officer; Dan Schulman, PayPal's President and CEO; Patrick Dupuis, PayPal's CFO; Devin Wenig, our CEO Designee; and Scott Schenkel, our CFO Designee. We're providing a slide presentation to accompany the commentary during the call. All growth rates mentioned in the prepared remarks represent year-over-year comparisons, unless they clarify otherwise. And all segment results are adjusted for the effects of foreign currency. This conference call is also being broadcast on the Internet and both the presentation and call are available through the Investor Relations section of the eBay website at investor.ebayinc.com. You can visit our Investor Relations website for the latest company news and updates. In addition, an archive of the webcast will be accessible for 90 days with the same link. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during the course of the conference call, we'll discuss some non-GAAP measures in talking about our company's performance. You can find a reconciliation of these measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures in the slide presentation accompanying the call. In addition, management will make forward-looking statements related to the planning separation of eBay Inc.'s Marketplaces and PayPal businesses, the planned sale of the Enterprise business and our future performance that are based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions, and involves risk and uncertainties. These statements include, but are not limited, to the future performance of both the eBay and PayPal businesses on a standalone basis if the separation is completed including expected financial results for the full year 2015, and the completion and timing of the planned separation.…
BO
Bob Swan - Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer
Management
Great, John. Thanks and good morning. I'll provide a brief update on the quarter results at the Inc. level before handing the call over to PayPal and eBay teams for more detail. During the discussion, we will reference our earnings slide presentation that accompanies the webcast. Before I start, I wanted to highlight that the eBay's board has authorized the decision to sell eBay Enterprise; and as a result, those results will be included in discontinued operations. And while it is not in our press release; about three minutes ago, we concluded the sale of eBay Enterprise for approximately $925 million. I'll touch on that a bit later. Q2 was a great quarter demonstrating continued momentum for both businesses. Revenue from continuing operations was $4.4 billion, up 12% on an FX neutral basis, a 2 point acceleration from the first quarter. PayPal revenue was $2.3 billion, up 19%. And eBay revenue was $2.1 billion, up 5%. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.76, up 9% on continuing operations. We generated $688 million of free cash flow from continuing operations in the quarter and $1.6 billion for the first half of the year. In the quarter, we completed the sale of the PayPal loan portfolio, increasing U.S. cash balance by roughly $700 million and we exited our stake in Craigslist. As of June 30, PayPal and eBay are capitalized with $6.6 billion and $8.5 billion cash respectively. In Q2, on a continuing operating basis we generated net revenues of $4.4 billion, up 12% with strength across both businesses. Currency negatively impacted our growth by approximately 5 points. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.76, up 9% on a continuing operations basis. The EPS improvement was driven by accelerating topline growth, a streamlined cost structure, and a lower share count. Operating margins were up 110 basis points on…
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Thank you, Bob, and thanks everyone for joining us this morning. I'm glad that Patrick and I had the opportunity to meet so many of you in person during our recent roadshow. It almost goes without saying that this is an exciting time for PayPal. I'm happy to report, as we enter this next chapter in our history, that we had another strong quarter, in line with our expectations, and we continue to help shape the transformation of digital and mobile payments around much of the world. With that, let me highlight some of our results and initiatives for the quarter. Payment volume was $66 billion, up 28% on an FX neutral basis, accelerating from Q1 where our payment volume was already up a robust 25%. Importantly, PayPal continued to gain share globally, growing at roughly double the pace of e-commerce. More specifically, our Merchant Services payment volume increased by a strong 36%, as we continue to win with the larger, leading commerce players, both traditional retailers and next-generation platforms. This metric also accelerated 3 points from Q1. On our last earnings call, I outlined the four metrics that best measure the growth and health of our business. As a reminder, they are our topline revenue growth, the scale of our customer base, the engagement of that base as shown by transactions per active account, and free cash flow. We continue to drive incremental progress across all of these metrics. First, I'll start with our topline growth. As Bob mentioned, our Q2 revenue was $2.3 billion, up 19% on an FX neutral basis, a 200 basis point improvement from Q1. Second, our customer base continues to expand. We ended the quarter with 169 million active accounts, an increase of 11%, and up from 165 million active accounts at the end…
PI
Patrick Dupuis - Chief Financial Officer, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Thank you, Dan. We feel good about our Q2 performance as PayPal continues to grow nearly double the rate of the industry. We generated $66 billion of payment volume, up 28% on an FX neutral basis, an acceleration of 3 points driven by strong growth at Braintree and Venmo. This volume translated into $2.3 billion of revenue, up 16% on a reported basis, and 19% on an FX-neutral basis. Our increased share gain is an indication that our strategy is working. We are winning with the leaders in digital and mobile commerce, both with large retailers who are expanding their footprint in mobile and online and with the next-generation apps that are transforming commerce. We have expanded our product solution from a proprietary web-based payment button to an end-to-end payment solution for merchants of all sizes. And as a direct effect of that strategy, where larger customers and broader service stack translate to a lower average take-rate with higher volumes, our transaction margin is declining year-over-year. But in return, expanding volumes bring economies of scale for half of our operating expenses, creating capacity to invest and the opportunity to maintain or expand our operating margin. And indeed, in the second quarter our segment margin expanded 160 basis points to 26.1% despite 190 basis points degradation in transaction margin to 63.2%. And for the first six months of the year, our segment margin was up 60 basis points despite a decline of 140 basis points in our transaction margin. Before going to guidance, let me first provide some context on our earnings quarterly profile. First, the second quarter revenue and margin benefited from the premium received on the sale of our U.S. held credit receivable portfolio in the second quarter. This sale frees up capital that we can redeploy into higher…
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Thanks, Patrick. Today, I'll cover three areas. First, I'll comment on our Q2 results. Second, I'll provide an update on our strategy to drive eBay's business forward. And third, I'll share my perspective about the future of eBay. Six months into 2015, I'm encouraged by the state of our business and the progress we're making against our strategy. The year is shaping up well and I'm confident in our full-year outlook. Turning to Q2. Overall, we performed well last quarter and our business was stable. eBay GMV grew at 6% on an FX neutral basis, a 1 point acceleration from Q1; while revenue grew at 5% on an FX neutral basis, a 2 point acceleration from Q1. Our active buyer base grew at 6% on a trailing 12 month basis and our trailing three-month active buyer growth was largely stable. Our active buyers transacted $20 billion of GMV in the quarter with 41% of that closing on mobile. Our Q2 GMV revenue and active buyer growth are clearly steps in the right direction. We've made solid progress, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to maximize eBay's significant potential. We're still feeling the effects of new buyer cohorts we did not acquire over the past year due to the SEO traffic issues, and we're still working to recover buyers that we lost after last year's cyber-security incident. To be clear, our absolute priority is to improve our competitiveness and drive more stable, profitable growth over the long term. We have a clear vision and strategy for our business. So let me now remind you of our plan for eBay and talk about some of the efforts we have underway along with some perspective on early results. As I mentioned on the last call, we intend to focus…
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our first question is from Mark May with Citi Investment Research. You may begin.
MR
Mark May - Citi Investment Research
Analyst
Thanks and good morning. A question directed to Devin and team on the marketplace. Regarding really marketing, I guess. I recall last year you talked about plans to kind of step up your marketing initiatives. I'm not sure that that scaled as much as you had planned. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your plans heading into the holiday season this year? How much are you planning to push in terms of marketing? Do you feel like the product is where you'd like it to be to push the pedal down more on the marketing front this year? And what sort of impact are you expecting that to have in the back half of the year relative to your guidance? And then, kind of on a related note, you talked about diversifying your traffic sources and leveraging more of the social media platforms. Can you talk a little bit about how the return on ad spend and sort of the customer dynamics there compare with your more tried-and-true channels like search? Thanks.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Yeah, thanks for the question, Mark. First on levels of marketing spend; in line with what we normally do on holiday, we will ramp up our holiday spend. It's likely that, depending on the underlying metrics that we see, we may do that a little bit more aggressively this season. But let's keep in mind that we are a very disciplined marketer. We don't throw money against the wall and hope things stick. We measure almost every penny that we spend and we try to get a return on that. It doesn't have to be immediate, but we understand the CLV of user acquisition and we're disciplined about the way we spend. So as you've heard me say before, it's not hard to grow an e-commerce company, it is hard to grow value in an e-commerce company and we're solving the grow value. So we will spend into the holiday, but we won't spend to acquire business or users at any cost, because plenty are doing that, but not plenty are creating value. On diversification of marketing, it is very important to me that we end up in a couple of years with multiple channels that are competing for our incremental investment dollar. I'll remind you that the majority of eBay's traffic comes directly to us either to our apps or to our site, that's the premium of our brand showing up; but not an insignificant minority comes through channels and it's very important that we have more of those channels that are competing for our dollar. And as you heard in my remarks, we're working very closely with the social and the messaging platforms to try to scale our investment to healthily – at positive ROI of acquired new users and new traffic. I'd say it's early. I'm encouraged by what I see. We are optimistic about the future, but it is early. And we are a very large digital marketer, one of the largest on the web; and the total amount that we've been able to spend into positive results on these platforms, it is still very small compared to our more established channels. So it'll take time, but we're on the path. Thanks for the question.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Bryan Keane with Deutsche Bank. You may begin.
BI
Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. You may begin.
Yeah, thanks. I just wanted to ask about One Touch, and maybe, Dan, can you explain the process of rolling it out? I think you said 50% of – you're hoping 50% of One Touch transaction in the U.S. to be – by year-end. What does it entail to get One Touch rolled out? And then, how do we – when is the same timeframe going to be to get it across all international?
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Yeah. So, Bryan, thanks for the question. So as I mentioned, we think One Touch is one of the most significant products that we've rolled out – functionality we've rolled out in the last five years for the checkout experience. It literally does take out all friction out of the commerce experience, where you can check out with a single touch. And so we're very excited about it. What we're doing with One Touch is, we've been able to seamlessly bring that over from the Braintree platform into our PayPal flows. And so as we bring it into our PayPal flow, a consumer doesn't need to do anything differently except opt in, that's what they have to do for that on each device in which they want to integrate One Touch. So for them it's a seamless type of integration. On the merchant side, the same thing. We're able to do this in a seamless fashion. The merchant doesn't have to upgrade. It automatically happens for the merchant as we take that One Touch capability into that payment – PayPal payment flow. And so we're just going about this in a disciplined fashion, rolling it out. We started this a little over a month ago to 1% of our traffic. We ramped that up to 5% of traffic. Then we started expanding it into other countries. We'll start expanding it throughout the world, but we're just doing it in a very disciplined fashion to make sure there are no issues with it. If we see it going better than we expected, we can accelerate that, but we need to make sure that we take that One Touch experience and in each of the different PayPal flows, and we have a couple of different flows there, that it works as exceptionally as it is right now in helping to increase conversion rates.
BI
Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. You may begin.
Okay. And how long will it take to get international, or through international on One Touch?
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
So we're already in the UK, in Canada. We have plans to roll it out to most of our major markets, the beginning of that rollout by the end of this year.
BI
Bryan C. Keane - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. You may begin.
Okay, great. Congrats on the start.
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Yeah. Thank you.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Colin Sebastian with Robert W Baird. You may begin.
Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Great. Thanks. Congrats on the quarter and on the pending split up. Dan, first, you talked quite a bit, again, about driving both user growth and frequency of engagements, and I wonder if you could relate that to both PayPal's acquisition strategy and some of the technology upgrades? For example, how you might be prioritizing the resources towards the consumer-facing part of PayPal versus the back end-facing part of the business? And then, secondly, to Devin. Can you expand on the timeframe, generally speaking, when you expect eBay can get back to stabilizing market share and maybe if there is a way to segment the performance of – today of the smaller sellers that are of a unique merchandise that you're focused on versus the areas being deemphasized, which I gather are larger merchants selling in-season products? Thanks.
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Colin, thanks for the question. First of all, we are very focused on, call it, two major constituencies. We've got merchants on one side, consumers on the other; obviously, developers are third constituency for us, but let's focus on merchants and consumers right now. So the first thing that we needed to do and we have spent a lot of time and I give a tremendous amount of credit to the team at PayPal and the former leadership teams at PayPal in terms of their foresight in the technological upgrades that we've done on our platform. The technology upgrades we've done allow us to innovate, they allow us to deploy changes and innovations in times that we were unheard of even a year or so ago. So we have the ability to constantly do A/B testing on our website, on all of the different programs that we have right now. That was difficult for us several years ago. As a result of that, our acquisition and our acquisition flow on that is improving dramatically as is our retention efforts. We are ramping up our lifecycle management efforts across the world, because we now have real-time data and information that we can use. We know what the various variables are that lead to indication of churn or the indication of a very profitable customer and we're accelerating on all of those. And the technology upgrades we did on the platform is helping us tremendously on that. On the consumer side, we obviously want to be more a part of their financial lives. We want to move from being an occasional use, twice a month, to them using us two times to three times a month. And we think that's obviously a stretch goal through all of our active base, but we…
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Colin, to your question on growth, let me just provide a little bit of perspective. We started the year and we described some of the issues that we were working through and we discussed the fact that some of the buyer cohorts that we had lost last year would take some time to reacquire. And because of that, it wasn't as simple as passing a calendar date and lapping it. There were some systematic issues on reacquiring buyers that we were working our way through, we were confident we would do it, but we also explained that it would take time. And in that context, we gave guidance for 2015, which was 0% to 5% revenue growth. As we got a bit further in the first half, we clarified our strategy and communicated that on our investor presentation and through our roadshow, and what we said there was we feel great about our future, but this will be a transformative moment for eBay where we've got a lot of hard work to do, and we're going to make some choices which in and amongst themselves are the right decisions for eBay, but they'll create some short-term growth issues. And in that context, we extended the guidance through 2016. Now with the first half over, what I'd say is things are going pretty well and we feel pretty good about that. And that's given us the ability (01:06:24) but I'd just refer you back to everything we said in the first half. We're doing what we said we would do. We're executing the strategy. We're working through the issues. All of that remains exactly as I said in the first quarter, on the roadshow and through the investor presentation. So I would just say we're feeling good about where we are,…
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from Carlos Kirjner with Bernstein Research. You may begin.
Carlos Kirjner-Neto - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Hi. Thank you. I have one question for Dan and one for Devin. Dan, Marketplaces user growth was 6% and your 2016 guidance of 0% (sic) [3%] (01:08:12) to 5% revenue growth may suggest we could not see material user acceleration. What are PayPal's alternatives to grow users, say, in the teens, in a world where eBay is growing users in the mid single digits? And what gives you confidence that you'll be able to sustain user TPV on revenue growth, based on these alternatives? And Devin, can you clarify whether the 2016 revenue guidance includes any material impacts from the steps you are taking on structured data to improve your SEO position, and from new initiatives such as Promoted Listings? And can you also comment on why eBay should have a passive investment in MercadoLibre going forward? Thank you.
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Hey, Carlos. This is Dan. Thanks for your question. Very consistently over the last – you look back over time, we've grown our subscribers through the ups and downs of eBay by anywhere between 3 million and 5 million a quarter; that have come in quarter after quarter. And this was no exception. Again, this quarter we grew our actives from 165 million to 169 million. And so as we work closely with eBay and we look at the acquisition that comes off of that, we've obviously expanded our acquisition efforts tremendously off of eBay. We have a tremendous amount of organic traffic that comes to our website that we convert. We have merchants now, 10 million plus merchants across the world that also generate consumer acquisition. And as our value proposition strengthens, as our brand strengthens, as our scale strengthens, there's a network effect that just naturally goes on. And as our lifecycle efforts which are still relatively nascent, I would say in general, expand I think we can improve our ability to both attract customers to PayPal, and importantly, retain and engage them, make them active customers. So I feel very good about that and I think our history proves that point. In terms of TPV growth, again if you look at our TPV results over the last several quarters, you can see very strong and accelerating TPV growth, and that is across the board. Not only is our MS growing 36% this quarter, but very strong growth out of Braintree, very strong growth out of Venmo, very strong growth in credit on the revenue side. So we have a very balanced portfolio across the world and across our product mix we're seeing good strength driving that TPV and revenue.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Two parts of your question, one was 2016 guidance and one was MELI's stake. On 2016 guidance, I guess I'd refer you back to my last answer. We put 2016 guidance up three weeks ago in the investor presentation and we're not changing that now. I think we'll come back to 2016 guidance as we get closer to the end of the year and obviously as we get closer to 2016. Whether the initiatives were in or not; when we gave the guidance, of course, everything in the business was in it, there was no footnote to that. But as we see the progress of these initiatives, we'll update the guidance when we get closer to 2016. Vis-a-vis MELI, I just – I guess, I wouldn't comment on a specific asset, I'd just comment on our approach to our portfolio, which is everything has to have a reason to exist in the portfolio. Not everything has to have a path to direct ownership or accretion of our results immediately, but, ultimately, we don't hold things for the sake of holding them, and you've seen that through the disposition of Enterprise and of Craigslist. And ultimately, we'll look at everything through that same lens. I think that vis-a-vis that relationship, it's been a strong relationship, they've done a great job. We've learned and grown together, and it's been a very positive and constructive relationship. But again, our portfolio – we understand that every investment we have needs to have a reason. And I think we've put our money where our mouth is with our actions over the last six months.
Carlos Kirjner-Neto - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Thank you.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Heath Terry with Goldman Sachs. You may begin.
Heath P. Terry - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Thank you. Devin, I was wondering if you could give us a sense where you are in terms of reactivating users post the data breach. Bob had given some stats along the way and kind of curious how much of an opportunity you still see there being in that reactivation? And then to the extent that you're starting to get some real data behind the reconfigured pages and the impact that that's having on traffic, you mentioned that it's either neutral to positive. Can you tell us how far along in that process you are and how much more there is to go before you feel like you fully re-categorized all the pages that are going to need to be, so that we can get a sense of sort of when we'll start to see the full impact of that?
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Yeah, thanks for the question. On the user growth, as we said and as you've seen, these are sort of long cycle movements, they don't immediately move up and down. They sort of are longer cycle sinewave type movements. And we've been moving down since last year, but I think what was very important in this announcement, in this earnings was the fact that we've seen, for the first time, really since May of 2014, quarter-on-quarter stability in user acquisition. So that doesn't mean we snap right back, but I feel like there is a reasonable chance, that we're at the bottom of that sinewave now and can now start working our way back up. So that to me is an encouraging sign. And just vis-a-vis the opportunity on user growth, I mean, yeah, one of the things I'm proudest of over the last four years is, we added roughly 60 million active accounts, which is a sign of relevance to say the least. So I think the ability to continue to acquire users and drive eBay's relevance across consumers and sellers is absolutely part of what we're talking about in our strategy. On the pages, it's really early. And like I said, this is going to be a long-term effort. I think – we've put pages up that I think are very interesting. They're interesting not just to reacquire SEO traffic, but they're interesting for what they mean for the shopping experience on eBay. This is not about another commodity page to sell another commodity item. This is about sharpening the focus of what is truly uniquely different about our business. And that's a spectrum of choices and value, which can only be done when we understand product families. So I am encouraged by it. But we have 800 million items for sale and this is going to take quite a long time. But the benefits will come as we work them. It's not all or nothing and we'll just keep working our way down and providing updates as we go. Thanks for the question.
Heath P. Terry - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thank you.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Sanjay Sakhrani with KBW. You may begin.
Sanjay Sakhrani - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc.: Thank you. I guess I had a question on active account growth for Dan. I was just wondering if you could give us some more details, maybe mix of geography, kind of the complexion of that new subscriber. And then just how long it takes that account to get to like average economics? And then just second question very quickly on – a model question, could we just get a sense of how to think about the share count on a go-forward basis for PayPal as well? Thanks.
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
So, Sanjay, thanks for the question. We don't break out our average account growth by region or channel coming in. What we do see though is strong growth. I mean, if you look at our TPV, very strong growth across the world, our acquisition is relatively similar to that. That's one of the benefits of having a truly global network right now. Half of our revenue comes from outside of North America and that's been the case for quite some time. Our TPV is strong. Our acquisition growth is strong as well. And when a user comes on, typically what we find is, if it's an active user that comes on and again we're doing lifecycle efforts to accelerate all of this, but we typically begin to see that benefit come on within the first year or so.
PI
Patrick Dupuis - Chief Financial Officer, PayPal, Inc.
Management
And, Sanjay, on the share count, the starting point will be determined by the conversion rate next Monday. So we can certainly not speculate at this point. The formula is pretty simple, the ratio of the opening price versus the closing – of PayPal versus the closing price of eBay Inc. Knowing that it's a one-for-one share exchange, that every existing holder of eBay Inc. it's one share of PayPal and one share of eBay.
Sanjay Sakhrani - Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc.: Okay.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from Matt Nemer with Wells Fargo. You may begin
ML
Matt R. Nemer - Wells Fargo Securities LLC
Analyst
Thanks. Good morning. I've got two questions for Devin and Scott. First, could you talk to the early seller response to the structured data requirement? Are key sellers clear on the new strategy? And then second, do you expect to be more granular on the share repurchase activity targets and other uses of cash post split? And can you clarify what your leverage ratio limits would be at the high end of BBB? Thanks.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Thanks. I'll take the first and I'll give it to Scott for the second. On the first, I think the response has been very good so far. We've seen almost no change in listings. We're phasing it in, so the requirement was June 29; the way we're implementing it is through category and that's being phased in. But right now, I think, the community has adopted it very well. We've seen no change in listings and no material breakage in GMV. So for whatever it is, three weeks in, it's going exactly as we had planned. And Scott – I'll turn it over to Scott for the capital discussion.
Scott Schenkel - SVP & CFO eBay Marketplaces: Yeah, Matt. A couple of points maybe around the capital structure. First, we've got a terrific business model that has 0% to 5% revenue growth over the next couple years, generates more than a couple billion dollars worth of free cash flow annually. And the tenets of the capital structure policy, if you will, that I've laid out earlier around focusing on the long-term value creation, balancing our growth and profitability, and investing and doing disciplined M&A, and managing our portfolio in a disciplined way while optimizing the financial flexibility and the access to debt and the cost of capital; we will continue to, I think, put down clear demonstrated results around each of those, while we continue to offset dilution and reduce the share count via opportunistic share repurchases. Maybe a couple of points on each of these. The repurchases, we expanded the authorization by $1 billion to $3 billion this morning. With regards to your question specifically around the debt, we're still on the final stages with the bond rating agencies about finalizing their ratings. We believe that will be a strong investment grade rating and that would be a debt-to-EBITDA ratio, somewhere between 2.5 to 3 which would provide us sufficient financial flexibility to take on additional debt if we chose. And over the course of the following months and years, we'll continue to execute and be disciplined around each of those tenets.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Operator, we have time for one last question.
OP
Operator
Operator
Our last question is from James Friedman with Susquehanna Financial Group. You may begin.
JL
James E. Friedman - Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP
Analyst
Hi. Thanks for sneaking me in here. I wanted to ask you, Dan, about merchant acceptance than a fairly straightforward question. If a merchant does not accept PayPal today, why would that be the case and how do you expect that to change over time?
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
Well, I think, as you know, we've got over 10 million plus merchants that accept us today and our merchant growth is accelerating nicely quarter-over-quarter as well. That's because we provide an extremely strong proposition to the merchant. We bring, first of all, now almost 170 million users onto the platform. Those are typically more active users than the normal Internet user. They spend more, they are more active; and so we bring a very engaged base to the merchant. It's simple and easy to integrate with us. We've made that a very low touch experience now. We're increasingly doing in context, so that when a consumer purchases on a merchant website they don't need to bounce back to something else, they can do it in context on the merchants website. So our value proposition is improving quite substantially. One Touch is another substantial improvement on that. And it's really a matter of going in and getting the right channels and getting the right touch points to those merchants. We have a channel that goes after large merchants. We're making very good progress on that. We – obviously there were some merchants that there was in inherent conflict when we were a part of eBay. This now opens our opportunity to look at every single merchant out there as a truly independent third-party payments platform on that. We're also beginning to win with some players like Bigcommerce where they're using our platform that really goes into the small market with partnerships and we're looking at more and more of that and making some very good progress on that. So I'm very encouraged by kind of the efforts. In terms of our merchant acquiring business, it's growing substantially, our value proposition is stronger than ever. And if you look at our strategy, the whole idea behind merchant acquiring is how do we become a great partner for merchants, how do we do more and more for them in this increasingly complicated world, how do we become 100% share of checkouts, so they can easily integrate any form of payment that they want to put in there. Whether it's Bitcoin or Android Pay or any of the credit card companies, we can integrate that for them. We can integrate into their loyalty, we can integrate into their rewards, we can integrate into offers. And so we really want to be fully a partner with a completely agnostic platform that allows the merchant to interact with their consumers on a very personal level. And so we're putting in a lot of pieces to that puzzle and feel really good about the initial success we've seen on that.
JL
James E. Friedman - Susquehanna Financial Group LLLP
Analyst
Thank you.
DI
Dan Schulman - President and CEO Designee, PayPal, PayPal, Inc.
Management
You're welcome. Thank you.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Thank you.
OP
Operator
Operator
Thank you.
DE
Devin Wenig - CEO Designee, eBay
Management
Okay. Thanks very much, everyone.
OP
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.