Lower operational costs
According to The Wall Street Journal, eBay plans to fire 3,000 of its 33,500 employees. The paper is said to quote insiders who claim that its core business, the marketplace, will be hit most by redundancies.
Analysts believe eBay is preparing the IPO of its payment branch, PayPal, somewhere in the second half of 2015. That particular division has brought a lot of growth over the past few years, but the division will soon be cut loose.
Acquisition preparation?
If eBay wants to be able to fight off increased competition from Amazon and Alibaba, then its operational costs have to be lowered as they have grown to 6.4 billion dollars over the past 9 months. That is about half of its total income, according to Bloomberg.
Analysts no longer exclude the possibility that eBay, in a slimmer and cost-efficient organization, may be preparing to present itself as an ideal acquisition target.