Earnings Labs

eBay Inc. (EBAY)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 21, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to eBay's Q3 2015 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference Mr. Selim Freiha, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, please begin.

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us and welcome to eBay's earnings release conference call for the third quarter of 2015. Joining me today on the call are Devin Wenig, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Scott Schenkel, our Chief Financial Officer. We're providing a slide presentation to accompany both Devin's and Scott's commentary during the call. We've updated the format of our presentation following the spinoff of PayPal and in anticipation of the completion of the sale of our eBay Enterprise business. All growth rates mentioned in Devin and Scott's prepared remarks represent year-over-year comparisons unless they clarify otherwise. This conference call is also being broadcast on the Internet and both the presentation and call are available through the Investor Relations sections of the eBay website at investors.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 through the same link. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, we will discuss some non-GAAP measures relating to our performance. You can find the reconciliation of these measures to the nearest-comparable GAAP measures in the slide presentation accompanying this conference call. In addition, management will make forward-looking statements that are based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions, and involve risks and uncertainties. These statements include but are not limited to statements regarding the planned sale of our eBay Enterprise business, the future performance of eBay Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries on a standalone basis, including expected financial results for the full-year 2015, the future growth in our business, and mobile commerce. Our actual results may differ materially from those discussed in this call for a variety of reasons. You can find more…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Brian Nowak - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Thanks for taking my questions; I have two. You talked about StubHub performing pretty strongly and kind of driving some of the acceleration in the U.S. Can you just talk about the growth trajectory of the core U.S. business in 2Q and 3Q ex-StubHub? How big of a benefit was that? And then the second question, I guess you talked a little bit about raising debt and potentially going into the markets. How do you think about potentially going into a net debt position as opposed to staying in net cash? Thanks. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Sure. Why don't I take that, Brian? First off, just to clarify, so U.S. segment growth was 3% which was up one point Q-on-Q. That one extra point was driven by StubHub's acceleration and thus the underlying core business in the U.S. was stable. To your question on net debt, our current BBB+ rating allows us to had a 3 times to 3.5 times EBITDA multiple to be slightly in a net debt position and we have no issues with being at that level. And, right now, our plan is to continue to assess how we think about repurchasing our stock price and all of the underlying tenets of the capital allocation aspects that I laid out. I think the most important thing as we look forward is that, that 3 times to 3.5 times gives us the capacity that we think is necessary to provide the flexibility to do all the elements of long-term value creation that we talked about, drive the growth of the underlying business and give us the flexibility to acquire businesses in the disciplined way that we talked about in the past. Brian Nowak - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Carlos Kirjner with Bernstein. Your line is now open. Carlos Kirjner-Neto - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Thank you. I have two questions. For several quarters, we have seen fixed-price GMV growing robustly but auctions shrinking. Can you help us understand the extent to which fixed-price growth is cannibalistic of auctions and how we think about fixed-price growth without this effect? And secondly, with respect to the 35% of relevant listings for which you are all already collecting structural data information, it mentioned I think on page five of your presentation, to what percentage of GMV do they correspond? Thank you. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Let me take those. Let me take the two of those. So starting first with fixed-price versus auction, I think there's a couple of things going on. First of all, historically, auctions tended to correlate better with the consumer sold business on eBay. And for several years that business has grown more slowly than the B2C business. But I think there's something also going on that's more significant than that which is we've affirmatively moved through our policies and through our format guidance, a portion even of the consumer sold business, to fixed-price. So we think that certain categories we just see better conversion when we move them from an auction to a fixed-price listing. An example might be consumer electronics. So we've made it more favorable from a pricing perspective, and our guidance suggests to consumers that they list the cell phone at a price that we know it will sell at rather than necessarily engaging in an auction, just to give you one example. So part of it is we've moved it affirmatively. Part of it is our…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Colin Sebastian with Robert W. Baird. Your line is now open. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Great. Thanks. I also have a couple of questions. First, Devin, during the analyst meeting and the last call you talked about needing, I think, 18 months to make the investments and transformation of the business, especially around some of the underlying technology. And I wonder if that's still the right timeframe to think about. And then secondly on the updated seller policies you rolled out at the anniversary event, there seem to be some renewed enthusiasm, I think, from that group, particularly among smaller sellers. And maybe just as a clarification on your comment, Devin, from the last question, I wonder if that small, mid-size seller base is really where you're focused. Or are you still engaging also with the larger merchants? Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, thanks, Colin, for the question. On the first part, I think the 18 months that I referred to was there were questions on this structured data initiative, when will it start to make a dent in things like SEO? And when will be able to see it in traffic and in SEO? And as I said, it isn't – it doesn't all come at once – it comes as you progress. But I said I thought you'd be able to start to see it in around 18 months. And I still think that's the case. We are making good progress, but the external impact of that, meaning our benefits from SEO, our benefits from traffic from those channels is still relatively limited. And that's why, both in my remarks and in the slides, we wanted…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Devitt with Stifel. Your line is now open. Scott W. Devitt - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Hi. Thank you. I had a couple questions. First on U.S. versus international growth, I was wondering, Devin, if you could just kind of go through some of the puts and takes in terms of this ongoing delta between the two? There's the impacts of search and security as kind of bad guys, I think, that are leveraged more to the U.S. business, but the U.S. business has had more than development of structured content. And then you also have the currency effect of the U.S. buyers buying European goods versus the opposite before the strength of the dollar. So could you talk through that first? And then secondly, on slide 14 of the deck, in the cost of revenue where you referenced the agreements with PayPal driving higher costs, I was of the understanding that the only incremental costs were tied to minimum volume threshold, so can you just explain what the incremental cost was tied to? Thank you. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Scott. I'm going to let Scott take the question. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Hey, Scott. A couple of things. First off, backing up on the U.S. growth. So the U.S., as we talked about in the past, has a significantly-impacted aspect of it from the strength of the U.S. dollar, which is heavily weighted on its export basis, on the export out of the U.S. And as you think about the U.S. dollar's strength, that's pushed down the GMV associated with that product going outside of the U.S. If you look at the GMB, which I highlighted…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from line of Mark May with Citi. Your line is now open.

Mark A. May - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst · Citi. Your line is now open.

Thanks. I think a lot of mine have been addressed, but, I guess, last year, Devin, you talked about some broader reach marketing plans heading into the holiday season. I know in the quarter you called out some of the leverage in sales and marketing came from reduced brand spend, but just thinking about heading into the holiday season and your guidance, what you're thinking about more on the brand-marketing side. And then in terms of the share repurchases during the quarter, given the timing of the PayPal spend, I'm just wondering is the amount of shares that you bought back in this quarter, is that kind of a pretty fair look at sort of how you'll be opportunistic going forward or were there were some sort of restrictions that you had during the quarter that maybe pulled you back a bit in Q3? Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Mark, thanks for the question. I'll take the first part; Scott will take the capital allocation question. On marketing, let me just start by giving a slight helicopter view of the way we view marketing. Historically, we've been very focused on digital channels and we've been very ROI-driven, and what that's tended to do is drive our marketing spend down the funnel. In other words, we tend to market heavily when we make sales and that's why we've heavily skewed towards things like paid search and other digital channels. I do think that as some of the markets shift and as more channels are available to us, we need to pivot some of our marketing to the mid funnel and to the upper funnel, and upper funnel is what we would call brand spend. It's more about eBay than about buying any particular item. We've…

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Next question, operator?

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Heath Terry with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Heath P. Terry - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thanks. Devin, I know you touched on this a little bit but when you look at the impact of the product categorization work that you've done, is there a tangible impact that you see or expect to see to traffic conversion rate or some other metric that you can discuss? And then on the quarter, as we look at the take rate, can you breakdown for us the impact that you're still seeing in take rate from the changes at StubHub, any of the contra investments that you've been making or anything else that's having an impact on those numbers that's worth calling out? Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks, Steve. I'll take the first part and Scott will take the second. Let me give you a qualitative rather than a quantitative view. I'm not going to componentize the qualitative side of structured data, but let me just describe it to you and why I think it ultimately has a positive impact on both traffic and on conversion. If we step back at what we're trying to do, what we're trying to do is really understand and associate the products that are on our shelves. We're trying to be able to group products. We're trying to be able to sell products in ways that are not dependent on search alone. We're trying to create better discoverability of products, both on the marketplace and off. If you come back to what we've been saying repeatedly, there might be a faster path to SEO recovery, but this cycle of spin it up and then spin it down is not sustainable.…

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with UBS. Your line is now open.

Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just two. One on the Classifieds side, thanks for all the information into the quarter, and especially some of the color on the call. But curious how you're approaching the sort of portfolio of assets you have inside the Classifieds business, where there might be places to allocate more capital against market-leading positions versus maybe the need to either invest or divest of assets longer-term in markets where you maybe don't have a leading position? And then the second question on general health of the consumer, there's been a lot of mixed data points. What was your view of how you saw the consumer act as we move through back-to-school, through Q3, and how the consumer is set up in some of your key geographies for Q4? Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, I'll take those. On Classifieds, I think what you said is exactly the way we look at it. Classifieds markets tend to be local, they tend to be national and at least historically for horizontal Classified players, they tend to be winner-take-all. Now that winner may not be clear right away and there's certainly competitor battlegrounds in certain markets, but the markets that we operate in, we have leading and winning positions in nearly all of them other than where we have seeds planted where we believe we can win. If we're in a market where we believe that we are not going to win or there's not a clear path to winning, then we'll exit that market and reallocate that investment to an area that we can. Our Classifieds portfolio, we have a great playbook, a team that really knows what they're doing. We've shown that we can grow and build this business. At…

Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS. Your line is now open.

Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Merrill Lynch. Your line is now open. Justin Post - Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.: Great. I would like to follow up on the last thing. Just – was the quarter stable? Like every month kind of consistent for you, no surprises month-over-month? And then secondly, just wondering about the SEO challenges you highlighted, obviously, big issues last year. Have there been continuing changes this year that have impacted you at all on that? And then lastly, any quantification you can give us on the size of StubHub and the changes you recently made, why you did those? Thank you. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Let me take the first two here, Justin. First one, the quarter did stable. In total for the core business or in the overall business, it was actually relatively stable. I know there was some anxiety around some September data that was out there and I think that depends by geography. Certainly, StubHub had a very strong September. The U.S. had a slightly weaker, as did parts of Europe, a slightly-weaker September. And Asia had a strong September. And so I'd look at the overall portfolio and go, not radically different month-to-month-to-month. SEO challenges, there's been no real new SEO challenges for the year. I know there's been a couple of changes around mobile and other things that have been out there, but, broadly speaking, we haven't really seen an incremental new impact to our business versus what we've been talking about. I don't know if you want to talk about StubHub, Devin. I think, overall, we don't give StubHub numbers but do you want to talk a bit about the changes? Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I can talk about the changes. We have new leadership at StubHub and it's a great business. It's the leading, obviously, secondary tickets marketplace. And we made a whole series of changes rapidly and saw a very nice rebound in the business. So some of that was around the product – there is a brand-new StubHub mobile experience. Some of that was around the way we display pricing changes. Some of that was around a brand campaign which has now gone bright, and you may see it on during the baseball playoffs or on football games. All of those had an impact and it was a fairly rapid turnaround of StubHub's performance back to growth, which was great to see. So I think they all contributed. Justin Post - Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Mark S. Mahaney - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Two questions. One, could you – any particular international markets you'd want to call out? I think I heard you talk about India earlier on, but any other key markets, Germany, the U.K. or South Korea either as skewing better than the overall international trends or skewing weaker? And then, secondly, just following up on that StubHub question, the issue at StubHub a year ago, year and a half ago, was real changes in the pricing of some of the major competitors in the market. Have you seen any changes in that pricing environment? Or is the improvement that you're seeing at StubHub purely due to your own execution in some of the things you've done at StubHub per se rather than ameliorating or better pricing conditions across the industry? Thank you. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, hi, Mark. It's Scott. Internationally, I called a few of these out earlier but just to clarify, that Germany and U.K. slightly less than the overall international growth. The Korea platform continues to grow very nicely I think at or above e-commerce rates of growth in Korea. And then I'd highlight our China business. Our China export business still continues to do very well exporting around the world into many of our major markets. And those are a big part of the drivers around the world and I think doing mixed results across the board, as I said earlier. Do you want to talk about StubHub? Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, well, let me just add on markets. I'll just call India out, Mark. India, there's so much been written about it and there's no doubt that there is some hype and there's been a lot of investment. But the…

Mark S. Mahaney - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Thank you, Devin. Thank you, Scott.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Matt Nemer with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open.

Matt Nemer - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open.

Good afternoon. I've got two questions. The first is when should we expect the disruption related to the mobile app launch start to normalize? And is that enough to, on a monthly basis, take the U.S. GMV negative? And then, secondly, is there any early evidence that the structured data related to the 35% of inventory that you've converted is already starting to help SEO? You made it clear that, on a consolidated basis, it's going to take some time and I'm just wondering on that subset if you're seeing some benefit. Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you. On the first question, on mobile, let me just reiterate that we're running the company for the long run and some of the things we're doing are really fundamental, and it tends to be that in marketplace ecosystems like this, fundamental things may not be growth-friendly in the short run, but they are important in the mid to long run. And mobile is one of those. I don't have an exact timeframe, but you're already seeing the beginning of recovery. And we watch carefully, the ratings are sort of public face of it. Frankly, I care more of what millions of people do than what a few people say, but they're both important, and the data reflects what people are doing. And we are beginning to see recovery and it is mirroring what we saw with the iPad launch. That was also a fairly large change. Metrics went down, then they came back up and of course they ended stronger than where we started. So that's the hope with what we're doing here and we'll watch it carefully and we'll adjust as we go. We're constantly looking at that data and listening to customers and we'll respond to it rapidly. Is it a slight drag on growth? Yes, it is, it's globally, as is, frankly, adding the requirement on structured data and a few other things. These are all things that are not necessarily growth-friendly in the short run, but important for us to do in the long run. So there's no doubt there's some impact in there. On the second question, the answer is yes. Again, we watch the data carefully. If you look at things like our slides, where you see us deploying structured data, and it is very small right now, you are seeing improvement in our rankings, you're seeing some traffic flowing, and you're seeing some conversion benefits being picked up. So that gives us comfort that we're on the right track, but I'd caution that this is going to take time, as I've said consistently for months now. So...

Matt Nemer - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is now open.

Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Douglas Anmuth with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Douglas T. Anmuth - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to drill down a little bit more on active buyers. You talked about an acceleration in the trailing three-months and also India being strong. Can you just help us understand how to think about the value of those new buyers in India relative to kind of the average overall and how long it takes them to ramp up spend? And then also, what are the actions that you highlighted in terms of reducing the sign-up friction on the platform? Thanks. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, so I'm going to take the first one. Doug, the active buyer growth of 5% is down a point Q-on-Q on a trailing 12-month basis. And what I've highlighted for the last couple of quarters is the trailing three-month is really purposely to help highlight how the more recent trends have developed based on the actions that we've taken. And the trailing three-month we've seen some modest acceleration, as I called out, based on the investments in India – which obviously on a GMV per user basis – is going to be lower than the rest of the world on average. And then the actions that we've taken to reduce friction on sign-in. And those include things like, over the last several months, providing security, much more robust set of security questions, allowing for text messaging to allow quick retrieval of a sign-in code, and then having users be able to remain signed in for a period of time. There's a number of other smaller things, but what that's had the impact of doing is actually reducing the churn of our existing user base. And we continue to work on going after those customers that have come back and not been…

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Operator, we have time for one more call – question. Excuse me.

Operator

Operator

Our last question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Ross Sandler - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks for squeezing me in, guys. Just one follow up to that last question and then a bigger-picture question. So if we look at the buyer cohorts in western markets like the U.S. and the U.K., how long do you think it will take for some of these new buyers that you're bringing in to get up to the levels of the top cohorts and kind of replace some of the drop-off that you saw from those top cohorts after the password breach last year? Is that a one-year phenomenon? Is it a multi-year phenomenon? Just a little bit of help there would be great. And then somewhat related to that, just big picture, are you comfortable with the low-double-digit fixed-price GMV growth that you're currently seeing? It seems pretty stable. Or once all the re-cataloging work is done, could we see some more aggressive marketing and essentially drive that number or that growth rate higher? How should we think about that longer-term? Thanks. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, Ross, the way I would answer your question on the cohorts is that as we get new buyer growth to reaccelerate in the core major markets, what I would expect is that those new buyers actually have a cohort profile similar to the ones that we have today. Underlying the trailing 12-month active buyer growth and the existing trailing three-month is a relatively stable set of cohorts that aside from the new buyers remain relatively stable in terms of how much they buy. And so, I don't anticipate that once we reactivate and get that new buyer growth going again that it would be materially different, although I don't necessarily have data to prove that at this point. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, and, Ross, on the second question, I think the question was, are we comfortable? I'd point back to the question that I answered around C2C, which is, I take the two together in part because it's not separate businesses anymore. And, no, we're not comfortable with a 6% growth rate. We're proud of the work we're doing, we're running the company for the long run, but we're not settling comfortably into a 5% or 6% growth rate. We're not satisfied with that. We want to push this harder, but we want to do it the right way and run the business over the long run, so this will take time. But our aspiration is certainly to grow the business faster. So I hope that answers the question.

Ross Sandler - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, everybody, for joining us on the call today.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.