EBay finished 2012 with a flourish as bargain-hunting festive shoppers flocked to its internet shopping mall and digital payment service to help lift the company's fourth-quarter earnings above analyst projections, Belfast Telegraph reported.
The results served as the exclamation point on the best year yet for eBay, an e-commerce pioneer founded in 1995 when the concept of buying merchandise online seemed absurd.
The strides that eBay has made in the mobile market have impressed investors, helping to propel the company's stock price to a 68% gain last year.
The company's fourth-quarter performance provided another boost as eBay stock edged up 40 cents to 53.30 dollars in Wednesday's after-hours trading. The market's reaction was tempered by a management forecast for the current quarter that was slightly below analysts' expectations. EBay earned 757 million dollars, or 57 cents per share, during the final three months of last year. That represented a 62% decrease from net income of two billion dollars, or 1.51 per share, at the same time in 2011. The 2011 numbers were inflated by a windfall from eBay's 8.5 billion-dollar sale of online communications service Skype to Microsoft.
For all of 2012, eBay earned 2.6 billion dollars, or 1.99 per share, on revenue of 14.1 billion. With the Skype sale, eBay earned 3.2 billion dollars, or 2.46 per share, in 2011. Revenue for that year totalled 11.7 billion dollars.
