Queen at Wembley... Texas vs. USC. Beychella. When you clench a ticket to a great event, you only sell for a high price. For eBay, it took $4B to give up online ticketing site StubHub. The buyer is Swiss-based sports ticketing peer Viagogo, whose co-founder ironically also co-founded StubhHub (small world.).
- EBay paid only $310M to acquire StubHub in 2007. It's selling it now for $4B — that's a brag-worthy 13X return.
eBay just dropped StubHub off at college... As one of 2 major destinations for event tickets (the other is Live Nation-owned TicketMaster), StubHub is positioned for success. But it lamely languished in eBay's home — sales last year barely budged up. Now StubHub can reach its full potential as part of a company 100% focused on ticketing. That's what happened with eBay's old subsidiary, PayPal.
- 2002: eBay acquired PayPal for just $1.5B because it needed some help processing payments.
- 2015: eBay spun off PayPal into its own publicly-traded company worth ~$40B.
- Today: PayPal is thriving, worth over $120B.
eBay needs to focus more on eBay... Behind this sale was a powerful crew of activist investors in eBay pushing the company to get back to basics. The OG ecommerce site has fallen behind — here's today's ecommerce scoreboard:
- Amazon is #1 with 47% of the US market.
- eBay has fallen to #2 with just 6.1%.
- Walmart and Apple are #3 and #4 — and they're not far behind eBay.