EBay Inc, the world's largest Internet auctioneer, said it will open a site for Hong Kong before the end of the year as the company expands in Asia. EBay repeated its sales and profit forecasts for this year and next.
The Chinese-language site is aimed at serving Hong Kong residents who use EBay's other sites as well as attracting new customers, said Bill Cobb, senior vice president for international business, during a presentation to analysts. EBay also will upgrade its existing Singapore operations, he said.
EBay, based in San Jose, California, has opened or invested in sites serving 28 countries, including South Korea and Taiwan.
Revenue from international sites is rising faster than eBay's US sales, more than doubling in the third quarter to US$156.5 million. Cobb said international-transaction revenue will surpass that from the US in the future, without saying when.
Europe "alone could ultimately be as big as the US," Cobb said during the presentation. That was a change from his previous year's projection that the international business could rival US operations.
EBay said it still expects earnings of as much as US$0.65 a share this year and US$0.91 next year. Revenue may be as much as US$2.1 billion this year and US$2.9 billion in fiscal next year, eBay said. The company reaffirmed its 2005 revenue goal of US$3 billion.
The company dismissed notions that Google Inc, the owner of the world's most-used Internet search engine, is a threat to its business. One of Google's features lets Web retailers pay to have links to their sites shown alongside search results. Some of the advertisers are former eBay sellers.
"We actually have a really nice working relationship" with Google, eBay chief executive Meg Whitman said. The company is one of Google's largest customers, and eBay recently began allowing search-engine companies to gather information from eBay listings that can be displayed in search results, she said.
EBay previously restricted such activity because of companies that were aggregating auction listings from its site and others as way to make money.
Having eBay listings and information show up in search results will help drive more people to the auction site, said Safa Rashtchy, an analyst for US Bancorp Piper Jaffray Cos.
EBay is "gradually realizing they've underutilized the search engines," Rashtchy said.
The auctioneer said it's taking steps to drive growth on eBay sites and at its PayPal payment transfer business. These include getting more people to visit the sites, finding ways to entice them to bid or list items for sale, and increasing transactions.
There were no big surprises during the company's 4 1/2-hour presentation at the Silicon Valley Convention Center in San Jose, said Jeetil Patel, a Deutsche Bank Securities Inc analyst.
The company demonstrated that it's willing to make investments at the expense of higher profit growth so that it can reap long-term gains, he said.
EBay "gave specifics on how well things are going," Patel said.
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