Ebay Spends More Than $1.2 Billion To Buy BillMeLater And DBA.dk, And Lays Off 10% Of Employees

eBay Firing 1000 (Finally), Needs To Fire More

Henry Blodget 

eBay (EBAY) is finally acknowledging its new reality and cutting its global workforce by 10% (1000 employees plus temps and open job reqs). The company got fat during its salad days, and now that buyers and sellers are fleeing to Amazon, Google, et al, these cuts are long overdue.  Unless the company can rapidly begin to reaccelerate gross merchandise sales, moreover, more cuts should follow...

Ebay Spends More Than $1.2 Billion To Buy BillMeLater And DBA.dk, And Lays Off 10% Of Employees

It’s a big day for eBay and CEO Jon Donahoe. The company is laying off 10% of its workforce, or about 1,000 employees plus several hundred temporary positions. They will take a $70 million to $80 million restructuring charge around the layoffs, they said.

And they’ve made two acquisitions: Denmark’s DBA for $380 million and Amazon-funded BillMeLater for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.

Regarding the two acquisitions: We covered dba.dk, Denmarks’ leading classifieds site, earlier this morning. BillMeLater, the larger acquisition, is a service that let’s ecommerce partners issue instant credit to buyers. You enter your birth date and last four digits of your social security number online, and it does a credit check on you in three seconds to determine whether you are worth the risk. Bill Me Later pays the merchant, and sends you a bill. The company has raised a ton of cash - at least $272 million - from Amazon, Azure Capital Partners, Chase Paymentech, Crosspoint Venture Partners, First Data Corp., and others...