Ebay – Financial Analysis Almost everyone has heard of eBay. If you want to purchase pretty much anything from a jet to a grilled cheese with an image of the Blessed Mother, eBay is the place to do it. It was first established back in 1995. Pierre Omidyar was writing codes on his home computer on the long Labor Day weekend to develop the website for AuctionWeb. He wanted a way for his girlfriend to trade Pez Dispensers. Once he had the website up and running, he posted his first auction item. It was a broken laser pointer that sold to a collector for $14.83. That was the beginning of a sensation. By the end of the year, Omidyar hired Chris Agarpoa t help with operation of AuctionWeb. In 1996, Pierre Omidyar realized that this is going to be more than just a side job. He hired Jeff Skoll as the president of the company and Pierre quit his day job. Revenues began to escalate quickly. In one month in early 1996, the revenue topped $10,000. By the end of the year of 1996, they had over 40,000 registered users and had a gross merchandise volume of $7.2 million. Then in 1997, AuctionWeb is retired and eBay is born. They are hosting over 200,000 individual auctions a month compared to the prior year where they had 250,000 individual auctions for the entire year. By the end of 1997, the gross merchandise volume increased by $87.8 million to $95 million and had increased their registered users to 341,000.
In September of 1998, eBay decided to go public. They listed their 1,000 shares of stock at a price of $47.37 on the Nasdaq under the symbol EBAY. On September 25, 1998, the stocks were listed at a value of $1.868. The stocks increased to $10.042 by January 1, 1999. See the chart below to see how the stock growth happened from the initial listing to the beginning of the next year. It was just a little more than three months and the stocks grew