EBay shares sink after posting financial results

EBay shares were down about 4 percent in initial after-hours trading, after posting second-quarter financial results.

But in terms of revenue and earnings per share, the company’s results were in line with expectations. According to Yahoo! Finance, analysts were forecasting an adjusted 45 cents EPS and revenue of $2.31 billion, which is about the same as the 45 cents per share and the $2.33 billion in revenue that the company posted.

It’s the GAAP number that was down significantly, at just 2 cents per share compared to 38 cents per share last year. The company attributes the decline to a “non-cash income tax change of $311 million related to the ongoing realignment of its legal structure.”

EBay also revealed gross merchandise volume of $21.5 billion, a measurement of total transactions processed on its platform. This was up just 3 percent compared to last year.

The company announced that an additional $3 billion was authorized for the share repurchase program. It’ll additionally be repurchasing $507 million in common stock.

StubHub, its marketplace for concert and sporting tickets, has been seeing slow growth. The division saw $227 million in revenue for the quarter, up from $225 million in the same period last year.

“During the past two years, we have made significant progress to modernize eBay and drive growth by improving the customer experience, creating a product catalog that covers more than half of our inventory, and sharpening the eBay brand,” said CEO Devin Wenig, in a statement. “We are on track and focused on creating an even stronger eBay for years to come.”

It is a competitive landscape for e-commerce, so eBay recently announced that it will be matching Amazon and Walmart prices on more than 50,000 items. This was revealed late in the quarter, so it’s unclear yet what kind of impact this will have on earnings.

It’s now been two years since eBay split from PayPal. EBay is currently the smaller of the two companies, with a market cap of $40 billion, versus PayPal’s $70 billion.

EBay shares are up 41 percent in the past year and closed Thursday at $37.18.