51–60 of 102 posts
The first thing that comes to mind is that the clock has just started ticking for PayPal to become accepted all over the web in places that it may not have been as welcome. For example, I'm sure Amazon will add PayPal within 90 days of Paypal going public (if not sooner).
The recent Alibaba ipo demonstrates this is a stupid idea and that eBay has been chronically mismanaged for years. That it has effectively squandered such a massive lead and headstart is incredible.
Spinning off PayPal really hurts the long-term growth potential of EBay. They haven't grown much at all over the past few years, once you take out the PayPal revenue. That will really hurt the stock price. Meanwhile, I would expect PayPal's stock price to grow as it's potential for growth is pretty large. Will be very interesting to see how they split the existing EBay shares for shareholder and at what price.
PayPal will have to become five times larger to equal the profit that eBay spins off. Perhaps they can pull that off, but it's going to take a decade or longer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, you're only allowed to learn from failure in Silicon Valley?
TWA wasn't a failure for Icahn. He made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling its assets to pay himself.
Once this goes live, PayPal will sooner or later face stiff competition beyond its current stage under the umbrella of eBay, competing against Chinese players like those of alipay and tenpay which already have users in the hundreds of millions. These players are agressively looking into the markets outside of mainland China. The landscape won't change in a few years, but in a decade, may look completely different.
Visa has a $134 billion market cap and is the payments juggernaut globally. I'd bet on them at least attempting to acquire PayPal.
To put Visa in perspective, their profit for 2013 was roughly 60% greater than Alibaba's.
Once this goes live, PayPal will sooner or later face stiff competition beyond its current stage under the umbrella of eBay, competing against Chinese players like those of alipay and tenpay which already have users in the hundreds of millions. These players are agressively looking into the markets outside of mainland China. The landscape won't change in a few years, but in a decade, may look completely different.
I agree that they are companies with promise, and certainly will be strong in their domestic markets... but I remain skeptical of their success in the West. I personally would not directly support Chinese businesses if I have an equivalent Western business that I can support, not simply because of xenophobia or some nationalistic nonsense, but because what China does as a Government is reprehensible. For all its faul…
Foreign investors still can't own more than the majority share in a Chinese company.
China is anti-West when it comes to supporting their domestic companies. They block out major competitors, such as Google or Facebook, and they make life very difficult for anyone that attempts to compete with their domestic companies.
The crap Alibaba pulled in stealing tens of billions in wealth from Yahoo by spinning off Alipay without proper compensation and forcing Yahoo to sell half its stake in Alibaba is par for the course in China.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TWA wasn't a failure for Icahn. He made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling its assets to pay himself.
A win for them (Icahn and Andreessen) is measured by their wallet not about the societal impact.