CARLSBAD, Calif. – In a time of dire earnings reports, a shaky economy and gloomy forecasts, eBay CEO Meg Whitman is one of the few Internet executives who can still wow an audience.
It might have something to do with the fact that one Corvette is bought and sold over eBay every three hours, or that $289 in goods are traded every second at the online auctioneer. The latter statistic translates to $9 billion in merchandise sold over the site on an annualized basis.
"We help practically anyone trade practically anything," Whitman told an audience of some 400 Internet executives at The Standard's Internet Summit. "There is no land-based analog for what eBay does. There is no doubt that this is a great financial model."
Her audience agreed. After running through eBay's most recent performance metrics, which were officially released Thursday, Whitman drew sustained applause from an audience that doesn't have much to cheer for these days.
Whitman emphasized how eBay had outgrown its roots as a site for trading collectibles. Businesses small and large now represent a large portion of eBay's transactions. And some categories that barely existed a year ago now represent substantial sales volume.
EBay, for instance, has become the Internet's largest seller of cars and car parts, Whitman says, with about $1 billion in annualized sales.
Whitman credited much of her company's performance to continued growth of its core U.S. auction business, as well as growing international operations. In addition, its fixed-price sales on subsidiary Half.com and on its main auction site, through a feature dubbed "Buy it now," have grown briskly, she said.
Whitman also sought to give other Internet entrepreneurs hope. "The underlying metrics of the Internet are very healthy," she said. "I remain very bullish on the Internet."
But Whitman was not as bullish on the prospects for the U.S. economy: She predicted that a recovery might take as long as 18 months.
