eBay feels spinoff pressure

Article Excerpt

EBAY INC. $33 (Nasdaq symbol EBAY; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 962.8 million; Market cap: $31.8 billion; Price to-sales ratio: 3.1; No dividends paid; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.ebay.com) operates e-commerce websites where sellers pay fees to auction items or offer them at fixed prices. The company also operates several other websites, including StubHub (ticket sales). These services are in addition to its local websites (among them Kijiji in Canada); eBay, in fact, sells classified ads in over 1,500 cities. The stock jumped over 10% recently after activist investor Elliott Management Corp., which owns about 4% of the company, demanded that it spin off StubHub and its classified ads businesses. In the third quarter of 2018, StubHub accounted for 14% of eBay’s total revenue, while the classified ads operation supplied 12%. Elliott feels those businesses as independent firms would enjoy the same success as eBay’s payment processer, PayPal (Nasdaq symbol PYPL). That firm’s shares have soared 160% since eBay spun it off…