Lydia Ventura, Investor Relations Director
Management
Good afternoon. Thank you and welcome to eBay's earnings release conference call for the fourth quarter 2005. Joining me today are Meg Whitman, our President and CEO; and Rajiv Dutta our Chief Financial Officer. This conference call is also being broadcast on the Internet and is available through the Investor Relations section of the eBay website. Before we begin, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that during the course of this conference call, we may discuss some non-GAAP measures in talking about our company's performance. You can find the reconciliations of these measures to GAAP measures in the tables of our earnings release. In addition, management may make forward-looking statements regarding matters that involve risk and uncertainty including those relating to the Company's ability to grow its businesses, user base, and user activity. Our actual financial results could differ materially from those discussed during this conference call. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include but are not limited to the Company's need to manage an increasingly large emphasized with a broad range of businesses of varying degrees of maturity. The Company's need to increasingly achieve growth from its existing users as well as from new users in its more established markets. The Company's ability to deal with the increasingly competitive e-commerce environment, including competition for its sellers from other trading sites and other means of selling and competition for its buyers from other merchants online and offline. The need to integrate, manage, and profitably expand the newly acquired businesses including Skype, the Payment Gateway business acquired from VeriSign and Shopping.com. The regulatory and competitive risks specific to Skype, the Litigation Regulatory Credit Card Association and other risks specific to PayPal especially as it continues to expand geographically. The Company's need to manage other regulatory tax and litigation risks, even as its product offering to expand and its services are offered in more jurisdictions. The Company's ability to upgrade and develop its systems, infrastructure and customer service capabilities to accommodate growth at a reasonable cost. The Company's ability to maintain site stability and performance on all of its sites while adding new products and features in a timely fashion, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, the Company's ability to profitably expand its model to new types of merchandising sellers. Assumptions and methods used to value and expense stock options provided to employees and the Company's ability to profitably integrate and manage recent and future acquisitions and other transactions. More information about factors that could affect our operating results is included under the captions "Risk factors that may affect results of operations and financial condition," and "management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations" in our annual report on form 10-K, and quarterly reports on form 10-Q. Copies of which may be obtained by visiting the Investor Relations section of our website. And now, over to Meg.