news blog from Euna

EBay has been working on a turnaround of its online marketplaces for over a year and growth has begun to pick up in recent quarters.EBay shares are up more than 20 percent so far this year, but further gains will depend on growth continuing, or even increasing, analysts and investors said.”Continued acceleration at the core eBay Marketplaces will be of paramount importance,” said Fred Moran, an analyst at Benchmark Capital.EBay’s Internet marketplaces, the biggest of their kind, bring together buyers and sellers and the company makes money by charging fees on transactions and other activity.The marketplaces business started as an auction website, but eBay has moved away from that model and now about 60 percent of sales are fixed price.Having more fixed prices has made eBay’s marketplaces more accessible to a broader audience of shoppers, helping the company compete better with Amazon.com Inc, the world’s largest Internet retailer.”The transition to fixed-price has paid off and enhanced the growth rate,” Moran said. “If that continues in the third quarter, the stock should be rewarded.EBay is expected to report earnings of 48 cents per share on revenue of $2.91 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. The company is due to unveil results after the stock market closes on Wednesday.When eBay reported second-quarter results in July, the company forecast third-quarter revenue between $2.85 billion and $2.95 billion and earnings of 46 cents to 47 a share.EBay also forecast full-year revenue of $11.3 billion to $11.6 billion in July and profit of $1.97 to $2.00 a share.A closely watched metric will be the Gross Merchandise Volume, or GMV, that changed hands on eBay’s marketplaces, excluding vehicle sales.”How people react to the earnings will depend on how much GMV has been transacted,” said Bill Smead of Smead Capital, which owns eBay shares. “We expect not spectacular but steady improvement there. EBay is participating in the growth of e-commerce, while a few years ago they weren’t.”Justin Post, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is expecting U.S. GMV growth of 14 percent in the third quarter, versus a year earlier. But growth could be as high as 16 percent, he noted.The focus on fixed price sales makes eBay a much more effective destination for holiday shopping, while the company has also reduced clutter on its website and improved cataloging and search functions, according to Post.

Maritime administrators announced an emergency and have sent a ship to the area after a belt of oil floated to the surface near a platform on the field on Friday. A construction ship struck an underground pipeline, the report said.It did not describe the scale of the spill and said the maritime administration ship was still investigating.Liaodong Bay is part of the bigger Bohai Bay, where CNOOC and its U.S. partner ConocoPhillips have been struggling with a spill in June that triggered government demands for tougher regulation of offshore oil operations.The leak from the Conoco-operated Penglai 19-3 oilfield released less oil in three months than BP’s Gulf of Mexico spewed out in a single day, but the response from Beijing was vehement.Last month, authorities ordered the shutdown of the 168,000 barrels-per-day field, in which state-run CNOOC owns 51 percent.CNOOC cut its output target, though the production loss is seen as having only a minor impact on supplies to the world’s No.5 crude producer.Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said last month that the government will strictly control new petrochemical projects around Bohai Bay.

Besides dealing with Europe and slow growth, one of the components of the G20 plan will be to boost demand, with exchange rate flexibility being part of that. The official said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would emphasize that when he meets Chinese Finance Minister Xie Xuren in Paris.