eBay Management Discusses Q4 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Transcript by:

eBay (EBAY)

Q4 2012 Earnings Call

January 16, 2013 5:00 pm ET

Executives

Tom Hudson

John J. Donahoe - Chief Executive Officer, President, Director and Interim President of Paypal

Robert H. Swan - Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Finance

Analysts

Ross Sandler - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division

Sanjay Sakhrani - Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, Inc., Research Division

Stephen Ju - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division

Heath P. Terry - Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Research Division

Benjamin A. Schachter - Macquarie Research

A. Justin Post - BofA Merrill Lynch, Research Division

Youssef H. Squali - Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., Research Division

Jordan E. Rohan - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., Research Division

Scott W. Devitt - Morgan Stanley, Research Division

Presentation

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by and welcome to the eBay's Fourth Quarter 2012 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference may be recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Tom Hudson, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Tom Hudson

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us and welcome to eBay's Earnings Release Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012. Joining me today on the call are John Donahoe, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bob Swan, our Chief Financial Officer. We're providing a slide presentation to accompany Bob's commentary during the call. All growth rates mentioned in John and Bob'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 our Investor Relations section of the eBay website at http://investor.ebayinc.com. 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 in talking about our company's performance. You can find the reconciliation of those measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures in the slide presentation accompanying this conference call.

In addition, management will make forward-looking statements relating to our future performance 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 expected financial results for the first quarter and full year 2013 and the future growth in the Payments, Marketplaces and GSI businesses, mobile payments and mobile commerce. Our actual results may differ materially from those discussed in this call for a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, changes in political, business and economic conditions; foreign exchange rate fluctuations; our ability to integrate, manage and grow businesses recently acquired or that may be acquired in the future; our need to successfully react to the increasing importance of mobile payments and commerce and the increasing social aspect of commerce; an increasingly competitive environment for our businesses, the complexity of managing an increasingly large enterprise with a broad range of businesses at different stages of maturity; our need to manage regulatory, tax and litigation risks, including risks specific to PayPal and Bill Me Later; and our need to timely upgrade and develop our systems, infrastructure and customer service capabilities at a reasonable cost while maintaining site stability and performance and adding new products and features. You can find more information about the factors that could affect our operating results in our most recent annual report on our Form 10-K and our subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q available at http://investor.ebayinc.com. You should not rely on any forward-looking statements. All information in this presentation is as of January 16, 2013, and we do not intend and undertake no duty to update this information. With that, let me turn the call over to John.

John J. Donahoe

Thanks, Tom. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 Earnings Call.

We had a great finish to an excellent year. Fourth quarter revenue was up 18%, and non-GAAP EPS was up 17%. Our fourth quarter results exceeded our expectations, and we're on pace to exceed our 3-year growth goals.

Before getting into the results, I want to take a minute to provide some perspective on our growth opportunities and on our company today. In 2012, we enabled more than $175 billion of commerce volume. This means that our company is now enabling 19% of global ecommerce and almost 2% of total global retail. That's the power and potential of eBay, Inc., and we're just getting started.

Four themes are fueling our momentum: First, mobile is rewriting the commerce playbook. At an extraordinary pace, consumers are embracing mobile as the everyday way to shop and pay. And mobile technology is accelerating Web-enabled multichannel retail innovation, and we are a leader in this mobile commerce revolution. Our mobile focus is delivering exceptional mobile volume growth, attracting millions of new consumers to our core businesses and enabling our retail and brand partners to engage their customers in new ways. Mobile is quickly becoming the new normal, and we're leading this new way consumers shop and pay.

Second, commerce is changing globally, and our global reach is the competitive strength. Our commerce platforms and mobile capabilities enable us to connect buyers and sellers everywhere. We have significant global presence, and our strong core international businesses are thriving. We have substantial long-term growth opportunities, including enabling more cross-border trade and expanding into emerging markets, such as Brazil and Russia.

Third, our brands are strong and we're investing to make them stronger. At eBay and PayPal, we continue to invest in marketing to further strengthen our brands and engage consumers on and offline. We're very pleased with the fourth quarter rollout of our new eBay logo and site enhancements. eBay has a fresh, clean look with a more contemporary and compelling user experience.

Read the rest of this transcript for free on seekingalpha.com