eBay 2015 Annual Report Download - page 5

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To our Stockholders,
2015 was a remarkable year of change for eBay Inc. We completed the separation of PayPal and celebrated
our 20th anniversary as an Internet pioneer. While doing this, we transitioned leadership and began executing a
comprehensive long-term strategy to reposition our business. We believe the steps we are taking will make eBay
more competitive by delivering a differentiated and compelling customer experience. We operate in a dynamic,
fast-paced environment that requires companies to innovate and change in order to maintain their leadership
positions. We embrace this dynamic and it guides our approach in everything that we do.
Our Guiding Principles
We have adopted an ethos that is the foundation of our culture and business strategy.
•We will persistently reinvent our business. eBay is one of the great Internet success stories. It was a
survivor of the dot-com boom and bust, and grew a highly profitable business when so many others
could not. We are driven by the notion of persistent reinvention — that for a company to succeed over
time and through generations, it must be resilient, embrace change and be willing to challenge its own
conventional wisdom with courage and conviction.
•We are running the company for the long-term. We are competing in a time of rapid transformation
where the lines between technology and retail are increasingly blurring. Ecommerce is becoming
simply commerce, and because of this shift, the stakes are very high. We recognize that we have to
evolve our proposition for buyers and sellers and build sustainable services that will position us for the
large shifts in consumer behavior that are underway. We will prioritize those investments and strategies
that we believe create value and improve our competitive position, even if they may have a negative
impact on short-term results.
•We are a technology company and are builders at heart. eBay was created through the vision and
hard work of a group of people who saw the potential to use the distribution of the Internet to create a
closed-loop marketplace that would allow buyers and sellers to transact safely and effectively. That
spirit of building remains in the business today. We get our energy from inventing new services for
buyers and sellers, from building industry leading products and from leading the way for how people
shop, sell and give.
•We are purpose driven. Our purpose is to empower people and create opportunity through Connected
Commerce. Our nearly 12,000 employees care deeply about the role that we play in the world. Our
platform provides anyone with an Internet connection and a product to sell with access to the world’s
markets. We are a business borne out of entrepreneurship, and we value and support entrepreneurs of
all kinds that use eBay.
Our View of the World and What it Means for eBay
Over the next five years, we believe a number of powerful trends will further re-order the commerce
landscape, and we have created a business plan designed to successfully position eBay as a continued leader in
our space. We will experience a world in which trillions of screens and sensors are connected to one another and
form an ecosystem of data that lives in the cloud. This influences how we are evolving eBay’s platforms,
including the experience for consumers and our value proposition for sellers.
Additionally, we are entering an era where “global commerce” is losing meaning as much commerce is
already becoming truly global. Nonetheless, structural barriers remain. eBay will continue to advocate to help
champion an external business environment that is supportive of the small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs who
rely on our platform for their livelihoods.
The way in which an emerging generation of consumers shops and thinks about consumption is also
changing. Increasingly, consumers are seeing the benefit of secondary markets as a driver of sustainability.
Millennials identify sustainability as an important principle, and we believe that for many people access takes
precedence over ownership. This has fueled the growth of a new generation of services and marketplaces. eBay