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eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

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Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#101

Post by cryptoegorophy »

hx8 wrote: post #29
qrush wrote: post #16

As a avid eBay customer I am pretty relieved. I buy 2-3 items a month and was selling for the last 2 years on the platform. It's come such a long way and is really a great, streamlined experience. Of course I'm sure folks that make their living off their stores & sales will have different opinions, but I'd say as a routine customer and seller it doesn't need an external company's takeover pressure on it.

I agree. eBay has a strong brand, one of the oldest web brands. It should just continue doing what it's doing.

They probably should do more marketing.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#102

Post by flyingcircus3 »

nkohari wrote: post #41
boringg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNBC hard fumbled in that they didn't even understand what the offer was. The CEO put that on full display and embarrassed the hosts basic knowledge of finance. It was hard to watch.

I have absolutely no clue how you could watch the interview and come away with this conclusion. The purpose of an interview is to ask Socratic questions to allow the guest to talk about something of which they have intimate knowledge. The CEO made it seem like he himself didn't know how the math for the offer worked, and even when presented multiple opportunities to correct that impression, he made no attempt to conv…

Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#103

Post by jerf »

danvayn wrote: post #24
tombert wrote: post #2

I really thought it was going to be the other way around. I am quite confident that if GameStop bought eBay, they would ruin it in the same way that K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company. I could be wrong, I'm not a business person, but it seems kind of obvious that a company like GameStop, whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.

The TD Bank securities commitment of 20B to finance the deal and GameStop having a market cap far below the acquisition cost suggests that buying eBay would’ve been very problematic and risky for investors. But comparing it to K mart buying sears isn’t really accurate to me. Like yeah, GameStop clearly fits into the death of retail, and acquiring eBay does increase their market visibility or presence. Beyond that, wh…

If eBay thought having storefronts would be advantageous, they would have them. It doesn't make a lot of sense for eBay to merge with Gamestop only for the combined entity to decide that the most sensible first thing to do is close all the Gamestop locations.

The physical Gamestop locations are also horrifically overprovisioned to be an eBay storefront. Many companies have already experimented with things like "lockers" which seem to be successful enough to hang around, probably because the costs are low enough they don't need to do much to justify themselves and they don't need dedicated store fronts. If they want better assurance that the things being shipped are what the sellers claim they are a partnership with UPS or Fedex and their wide variety of existing storefronts that are already provisioned with everything you need to ship almost anything makes orders of magnitude more sense, and nobody has to "acquire" the other to make that work, without the square footage of a Gamestop location.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#104

Post by rtkwe »

_boffin_ wrote: post #40
aresant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context this comment misses is Gamestop's secret weapon is their CEO Ryan Cohen who has been sitting around the hoop trying to figure out how to leverage Gamestop's fundraising capabilities to do something big Couple of highlights on Ryan - Built and sold Chewy from a startup to the largest ecomm acq of all time - Became #1 individual shareholder of Apple early on - Bought a 10% share of Gamespot in 2020 becoming…

Wasn’t there something where his comp package mandated 50b in market cap? Ahh. 100b https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/202...

He gets money every $10B of market cap anyways so even if it never grows this acquisition makes RC money.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#105

Post by qrush »

TravisJamison wrote: post #43
qrush wrote: post #16

As a avid eBay customer I am pretty relieved. I buy 2-3 items a month and was selling for the last 2 years on the platform. It's come such a long way and is really a great, streamlined experience. Of course I'm sure folks that make their living off their stores & sales will have different opinions, but I'd say as a routine customer and seller it doesn't need an external company's takeover pressure on it.

Are you trading collectibles? I’m just genuinely curious what someone would buy with 2-3 transactions a month.

I was selling NES/SNES games + boxes. After ~2 years of sporadic sales, I ended up just offloading them to a guy who has a huge used games outpost at a flea market.

I buy a mix of things: clothes, watches, and usually tiles from my favorite pottery in Michigan: Pewabic.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#106

Post by qrush »

HPsquared wrote: post #62
TravisJamison wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trading collectibles? I’m just genuinely curious what someone would buy with 2-3 transactions a month.

It's great for used car parts (both buying and selling, as a hobbyist)

I backed into my garage stupidly and broke my RAV4's side mirror. I found a guy in Japan who was selling the exact part I needed (the cover for the mirror matching my paint color), OEM for $50. It's like Craigslist but global on eBay. Never change.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#107

Post by sushid »

happymellon wrote: post #85
chromadon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it for non collectible stuff. I’m always buying weird interesting things. Old computer stuff at least once a month. I buy most of my physical games from eBay too

> Old computer stuff at least once a month. So, collectables...

How did you determine that? As someone who also buys old computer stuff from time to time, I wouldn't say they are collectibles.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#109

Post by xp84 »

colechristensen wrote: post #5
tombert wrote: post #2

I really thought it was going to be the other way around. I am quite confident that if GameStop bought eBay, they would ruin it in the same way that K-Mart buying Sears ruined that company. I could be wrong, I'm not a business person, but it seems kind of obvious that a company like GameStop, whose current existence appears to be due to a weird short squeeze anomaly, is not a sustainable business.

Gamestop turning into an eBay storefront makes a lot of sense to me and this seemed to be a very rational step to take when the short squeeze anomaly left them with billions in the bank and a business model that no longer makes very much sense with physical game sales being eaten by digital-only sales along with the potential decline of the console. They already have the position of used buying and sales, extending t…

I think you’re right about Kmart/Sears, though the interesting thing was that Lampert was correct that Sears had a great deal of real estate which had tremendous value. If someone skilled at retail had bought it, they could have used the money from selling some of that, to fix the business. Of course, Lampert was only skilled at finance and RE and very obviously just planned to gently wind down the business while selling off its assets, which is much less risky to do than fixing it - and may have yielded better financial results anyway.

That’s why the popular perception is that the Kmart transaction and Lampert killed it, even though their lot had really been cast 15+ years before, when they stopped innovating, and really stopped investing in their stores completely, without getting serious about e-commerce either. That poisoned their brand, which made it really hard to imagine turning it around.

Re: eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible

#110

Post by hx8 »

podgietaru wrote: post #88
ecshafer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. Its great. You can walk around, look at things, talk to people, maybe buy something you wouldn't based on cover art or whatever. You get to drive a little, listen to some music.

Legitimately. Especially if it's a book shop.

Book shops are actually one of the few physical stores I still want to visit
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