Earnings Labs

eBay Inc. (EBAY)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Jan 27, 2016

$100.32

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the eBay, Inc. Fourth Quarter 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 be given at that time. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference Selim Freiha, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us and welcome to eBay's earnings release conference call for the fourth 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. All revenue and GMV growth rates mentioned in Devin and Scott's prepared remarks represent FX neutral 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 related 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 future performance of eBay Inc. and its consolidated subsidiaries including expected financial results for the first quarter and full year 2016 and the future growth in our business. Our actual results may differ materially from those discussed in this call for a variety of reasons. You can find more information about risks, uncertainties and other factors that could affect our operating results in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K, in subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q,…

Operator

Operator

Certainly. Our first question comes from the line of Richard Kramer from Arete Research. Your question, please.

Richard Kramer - Arete Research Services LLP

Analyst

Thank you very much. Very quickly, can you give us any sense of the profitability of StubHub and Classifieds now that you've broken it out? Is it something you'll be able to speak to? And then, I guess, a successive question, can you talk about your international guidance in context not just of FX, but whether you're seeing impacts from the macro situation that we have, we've all been hearing about? How much have you factored into your guidance with respect to that? And are you seeing an impact currently on the business? Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Scott's going to take the first part. He'll talk about StubHub and Classifieds, and then let me take the second part of your question. This was on margin on StubHub and Classifieds. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. So what we've done this quarter is essentially double-click on Classifieds, Marketplace and StubHub in the way we run them which is for both StubHub and Marketplace on a GMV basis and for all three on a revenue basis. That's how we run the company. And the underlying expenses, we run as a portfolio, and we deploy capital in that way between business units to optimize across our portfolio. And so we won't be this time giving a double-click on margin now or going forward.

Richard Kramer - Arete Research Services LLP

Analyst

Okay, fair enough. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Let me take your question just on international in the context of the macroeconomic environment. I would say that there are two things to note. The first is that the strong dollar, as Scott pointed out, obviously has a translation effect, but it equally has an operating effect. We have a strong cross-border business. The continuing strengthening of the U.S. dollar has really impacted the exports of U.S. goods which was one of our biggest export corridors. So the strong dollar is both a translation impact and it's certainly underlying that in operating impact. And our trade flows are not purely balanced. So it's helped our China business somewhat paradoxically in some of our import corridors making those goods seem cheap, but it doesn't net out to zero. In fact, it's been quite a significant headwind starting last year when the dollar started to strengthen, vis-à-vis just the overall macroeconomic situation. I guess what I would say is right now we don't – we're watching it very carefully. It's hard not to watch it given what we've seen out of both earnings and out of the market. I would say that in the fourth quarter, we were very happy with the holiday. We had a very strong Cyber Five, and we started to see some small signs of softening in December. We're not assuming any significant change in the macroeconomic environment, but it's obviously we and every company is watching it very, very carefully. So I'd say right now FX is a much bigger operating impact than overall market softening. We don't have very much of a domestic China business for instance, but we're certainly watching that carefully as I think every company is right now. Scott…

Richard Kramer - Arete Research Services LLP

Analyst

Okay. That's super helpful with respect to the guidance. I guess one quick follow-up, could you talk about the developments of the advertising business? And, certainly, at the end of last year, you had launched quite a few new native advertising products. Can you talk about how that might scale over the course of 2016, and how much of a priority that might be to sort of revive that business with eBay? Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. It's important to us. We're very optimistic about things that we've done such as promoted listings. We're in a very, very early stage and, in fact, we just really opened up the thresholds on that based on the performance at the end of the last quarter and it will grow over time. It's not yet a material lever in our results, but I'm certainly optimistic about advertising. We still have an enormous traffic and customer flywheel, 162 million active customers and we do think there are other ways to monetize that. And this is in keeping with what we've said which is we could throw a lot of money at short-term growth. We're not doing that because we are being disciplined about our investments and we're investing in the platform and in new business opportunities that we think will be important for eBay two years, three years from now. And this is one of those areas, for sure. And you'll see a lot of activity in 2016.

Richard Kramer - Arete Research Services LLP

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark May from Citi. Your question, please.

Mark A. May - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you. In terms of your revenue guidance for this year excluding the impact of currencies, just wondered if you could shed a little more light on kind of what you expect to be some of the key underlying drivers there, maybe the B2C versus B2B, maybe what your expectations are for growth in Classifieds and StubHub. Just trying to get a little bit more perspective on what your expectations are for the various segments of the business. And then on the listings restructuring, for the portion of listings that you've processed and enriched, if you will, wonder if you could provide any updates or insights on the impact that that's had on SEO and conversion rates and things like that? Thank you. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. On the first part, we're not going to break guidance out by segment. We're going to keep it at the top level. But I guess what I'd say is, I would expect our business is heavily skewed towards transaction revenue. Obviously, it's the core business and it's take rate on transactions. And that's implicit in this guidance. I think we'll see growth in marketing services, but it's a relatively small part of the portfolio compared to transaction revenue. And I would expect to continue to see reasonable growth from the components, but it's not – there's no major mix shift going on in 2016. I think you should assume that it will follow the path in terms of the components that it followed in 2015, roughly. Second part of the question, sorry? Listings restructuring, yeah, sorry, Mark. Look, this is a major effort and we're a data-driven business. So we don't do anything without measuring it and ensuring that we're on the right path. And this…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Heath Terry from Goldman Sachs. Your question, please. Heath Patrick Terry - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thanks. Just wanted to try and get a sense of as you are seeing these higher conversion rates, can you give us a bit of color behind what is – where that's being driven? Is it conversion of visitors to eBay and to purchasers? Is it an increase in the average basket size for your existing purchasers? Are you primarily seeing reactivation among customers that had maybe fallen off of eBay during the issues from last year? Just really trying to get sort of a better understanding as to the details behind these conversions – or these improvements in conversion rate and activity that you're seeing in the underlying business. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'd say the one we're most focused on is improving traffic and converting traffic to active buyers. And I'll give you a really practical example of where that's happening. Historically, we would send people to a search results page, and that search result page depending on the hundreds of millions we have, was of mixed quality and we get some conversion of that. Now, we're sending people where we have the pages to a structured browse page like the ones that are in the accompanying slides, and we know we're getting better conversion of traffic to active buyers in those pages. Equally, we're watching very carefully things like SEO. I mean, we have a limited number of pages still. But we're watching where are those pages ranking? What kind of traffic are those pages generating? And, ultimately, does that traffic convert to active buyers? And we like what we see so far. We believe we're on the right path and it's intuitive, it's not a hard reach to look at the page and say there's great inventory, it's a great customer experience. For a while people have asked me why is eBay complicated, and why is it hard to navigate, and why aren't there things like product reviews? Well, increasingly, now there are. It's not hard to navigate, these pages are really elegant. They're converting better and we're beginning to get really quality content on them because we now understand products and not just listings. So I just gave you two pragmatic examples. There are others, but those two alone are important. They're major levers on our business. Heath Patrick Terry - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Carlos Kirjner from AllianceBernstein. Your question, please. Carlos Kirjner-Neto - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Thank you. I have two related questions. If you look at your user and GMV growth trajectory, there is a clear break in the trajectory in May 2014, which one could plausibly attribute to the password reset issue. It seems to be behind the company and the SEO issue which seems to be still an issue. The first question is whether there has been any other aspects of the business that deteriorated and have contributed to the deceleration of FX neutral GMV and revenues or whether these two are – or whether the SEO issue is the main issue. And secondly, unrelated, forgive me if I'm a bit deaf, but I hear you saying you are making progress and believe that the structured data initiative will work based on your early experience. I see your slide saying that structured data will cover 60% of relevant listings by end of February, but you had to say that we shouldn't expect the impact of the strategic initiatives in the foreseeable future. Will we see any benefit from structured data on traffic acquisition in 2016, and is that in your guidance? Thank you. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thanks for the question. I would say we don't talk about May of 2014 anymore because we're however many months on and the world has moved on. I'd say nothing fundamentally has changed, but our strategy is different, our investments are different, we're making a major transition of the business. So we don't point the finger at any one event. I just come back to this is exactly what's happening with our business is…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley. Your question, please. Brian Nowak - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Thanks for taking my questions, I have two. The first one is on the 2016 operating margin guidance. I think in – maybe my notes are wrong, I guess I thought in June the margin guidance was 31% to 35%. Now, you're saying 31% to 33%. I guess, we'd just be curious about kind of what changed to kind of change the top end there, is that is FX or is – you're having to spend more on something else than you expected to in June? And then the second one on the international piece is, I'm curious, I know last quarter you mentioned Germany and the UK have been growing slower than the overall average. Can you just talk about how fast Germany and the UK grew in the fourth quarter relative to overall international? Thanks. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. So let me take the first one on margin rate. So we did say 31% to 35%, and we did go 31% to 33% today for 2016. With the midpoint being around 33% we had from earlier this year or middle of last year I should say the major difference is about a point of foreign exchange movement between then and now. And so really apples-to-apples, we'd be about at the same center point of margin rate, but one point of degradation from foreign exchange. What I'd highlight is that underlying that, there's been significant movement and we continue to try and drive productivity to be able to fund our investments in the things that we've been talking about. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: And with regard to the UK and Germany, they did not – they performed in line with the portfolio, there was no outlier in performance. In fact, they picked up a little bit this quarter versus last. Brian Nowak - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Douglas Anmuth from JPMorgan. Your question, please.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Hi. This is actually Dave (45:01) in for Doug Anmuth. So our question is based on – is on the sales and marketing spend. So in 2016, do you guys have any plans to step up the spend? And related to that, is the product where you guys wanted it to be to market it more? And a second follow-up question is, are you guys going to be moving towards a contra as you guys have been doing in the past? And that's my question. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: So let me take – that's all three good questions. Let me take them in turn. So first of all, on the product, as I said in my remarks, I'm really excited about this year because I do believe that with some of these foundational investments in place, you're going to see the product evolve relatively quickly for buyers and sellers. So the product's never – it's never static; it's always evolving. But I think this will be year of particular innovation for us. We have a very exciting pipeline. Based on all the things that we've been talking about, based on our ability to now understand products and persistence, we believe we can generate a really differentiated experience that shows our customers what's unique about eBay. It doesn't talk about it, but shows them. So I do think this will be a year of rapid innovation in the product experience. Second is sales and marketing. There's no – a couple of things. First is, we are going to start almost immediately pivoting some of our spend up the funnel to what we would call more traditional brand spend. That doesn't mean television, it just means instead of selling you an iPhone or a sweater, we're going to talk more about eBay and the brand. Whether or not we ultimately spend more in that will depend on what we learn from doing that. We do believe that brand is more important, that we have to more sharply define our brand in an increasingly crowded environment, and you'll see us start to do that. There are no plans to significantly change our spend, but how we spend will begin to change and, in fact, it already is changing. Final comment is on contra. There's no – we're very disciplined about contra revenue. I would say that we spent a bit more on that versus a little less on marketing in the fourth quarter because holidays become very deals-driven. And this holiday, we participated in deals aggressively across electronics, fashion, home and garden, and we got good results. But that does cost some mix shift in spending more on contra. I would expect those numbers to go back to historical averages. There's no break from trend other than we plus-up in the fourth quarter because that's the way shoppers are shopping.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan from UBS. Your question, please.

Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Thanks for taking the question, I guess two. One, when you start thinking about the cadence of investments you're making in the business, I guess this one would be for Scott, how do think about the cadence of investments as we move through the year first half versus second half and whether we might see more leverage against investments in the second half for the year? Or really should we be prepared for a full year impact on the leverage side from investments? And I guess, for Devin, one on marketing efficiency long-term, you've talked a lot tonight about traffic sources and improved channels, even referenced social. Have you learned anything as you continue to evolve the platform about how marketing efficiency might evolve for eBay long-term? Thank you. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Okay. So I'll – real quick on the cadence. I'd say the one cadence aspect I would call out – maybe a couple. First off, within our G&A cost bucket, we're going to have two more quarters of essentially no year-on-year comps in the baseline for standup costs. And so there's going to be, before we see productivity in G&A, we're going to have relatively difficult comps as we stood up to the company and without any baseline comparisons. I think what you could expect in product development is a continued pace of investment in line with the percentages of revenue that we've shown over the last, let's call it 12 months to 18 months, but certainly the last six months. And sales and marketing, I would call out the pacing and refer back to the earlier response around contra. In some quarters, we may decide based on the returns that we think we can get for the strategies that we're…

Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Peck from SunTrust. Your question, please

Kunal Madhukar - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Hi. This is Kunal for Bob. Thanks for taking the question. Couple of questions actually. One is of the structured data and at 38% coverage you're currently going up to 60%, how much of the GMV does that typically represent? Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Do you know the answer to that, Scott? If we go to 60%, that's of listings, I don't know if we know offhand. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. The way I would think about it is we are talking as a percentage of relevant listings, but there's probably 10%-ish that aren't relevant. But that aside, I think you can kind of use this as a guidepost of GMV. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. I don't think – we could check that number, but I don't think it's that different. I think when we talk about relevant listings, the GMV roughly follows the relevant listings. Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. And, Kunal, maybe to kind of go back to one of the earlier questions, I'd point back to that really is an input metric to then us processing that information and churning out than a different product experience that ends up on search engines in a way that brings the traffic which would drive that active buyer increase and it brings the GMV. And so we're not tied to 60% to – yeah, 60% of our GMV is going to be covered. 60% of the listings, roughly speaking, GMV, is covered with a catalog at the end of this process halfway through the year and then a portion would then have been processed and out, if you will, in the wild and out there being indexed in Google or other search engines for users to find an access.

Kunal Madhukar - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, great. And a quick question on the share repurchases. Based on the run rate in the second half of 2015, it would seem you are probably guiding broadly to about $2.3 billion of buybacks this year, again, based on market conditions. What is the limitation on the number of shares you can actually buy back in the first two years post the split? Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, Kunal, a couple of points. Our guidance includes the fact that we expect to be buying back about at the same rate as the last two quarters each quarter. And we expect to also be buying back the dilution offset, and so it's maybe in the range of what you're talking about. We have $1.8 billion remaining in our existing authorization. There's nothing precluding us from asking for more. Look, we have a limitation in the first two years to protect the tax-free nature of the spin of about 20%, a little bit less than 20% in that range, and that would be our guardrail for the first two years.

Kunal Madhukar - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes in the line of Mark Mahaney from RBC Capital. Your question, please.

Jim Shaughnessy - RBC Capital Markets LLC

Analyst

Hey, guys. This is Jim Shaughnessy stepping in for Mark. One quick question from us around StubHub revenue. Just obviously seeing a nice pick up here, wondering your thoughts on the sustainability of that growth rate and how we should think about that going forward? Thanks. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Again, we're not going to guide on the segment – on the components of it, but I'd just say StubHub is a great business. It's a leader in its category. It has opportunities to expand internationally. It is increasingly partnering with leagues and teams to move from secondary opportunistically into primary, and it's a great business. So I would not expect that, I mean, these are obviously very, very strong growth rates this quarter. There were, as we said, some unique things. There was the pickup on the back of the product changes, it was a very strong World Series, it was a very strong concert landscape. StubHub also bounces around quarter-to-quarter based on the events. It's much more choppy than eBay just because it sort of depends what the matchup is in the Super Bowl and what the events landscape is, and it was a very strong events landscape. So I would expect StubHub to keep growing. I'm not sure I'd expect it to keep growing at this rate, but it's a good business and we really we're proud of the fact that we've been able to grow StubHub using some of the eBay traffic flywheel over the last several years and it's a real good business just like Classifieds is.

Selim Freiha - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Operator, we'll take one more question.

Operator

Operator

Certainly. Our final question comes from the line of Brian Pitz from Jefferies. Your question, please.

Stan Velikov - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. This is Stan Velikov here for Brian. Active buyers growth stabilized in Q4 at about 5% while sold items growth accelerated 3 point sequentially to 4%. What were the puts and takes here? And how should we look at these metrics going forward? And, also, what part did India play in the active buyers trend stabilization? Scott Schenkel - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. So on active buyers, India plays a big role in our overall active buyer base. But on a Q-over-Q basis and in the growth perspective, it didn't have a material impact this quarter. Last quarter, we called out, it helped a bit. This quarter, it didn't necessarily accelerate further. The way I'd think about active buyer growth is it's been massively impacted by two things over the last two years. One was password reset and I think that's largely behind us. And I think the other is SEO, SEO as explained in many different forums has an over-indexing impact on acquiring new users, and thus has depressed the top of our funnel and reduced our overall active buyer growth over the last couple of years. And that's why the structured data and SEO initiative is so important because it'll work our way back up on that measure. On sold items; sold items, the change this quarter was just driven primarily by the higher mix of electronics sold during the holiday. This tends to go up and down depending on everything from country and seller mix to hot items. So it's relatively difficult to predict and correlate. And just to explain it for Q4, it was higher degree of electronic items.

Stan Velikov - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Thank you. Devin N. Wenig - President, Chief Executive Officer & Director: Thank you.