If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Today, I was reading about this thing with eBay cutting 1000 jobs. Hey, no one is going to question a company that’s having financial problems in this particular time, right? Well, I question it. Here’s why. eBay is cutitng jobs, not because they are having a bad year, quite the contrary. Their year is good. Bigger profits. Yes, and I know how. They changed their fees again recently. It cost more than ever to sell something on eBay. When I first joined, the fees were tiny. You could actually make a small income there. Now, the fees are getting higher and higher. More rules. More problems. Yet, they have a bigger profit than it appears since they are cutting jobs. So, what’s up? The company line is that they are streamlining the business. Uh huh.
In effect, they are cutting 10 percent of their workforce. Then, they are getting rid of the temps. Experts say that they will have restructuring charges in the millions. Guess who gets to pay for that? Actually, the consumer will only pay if the seller ups the prices to compensate for the fees. The big bywords here are “efficiency” and “savings”. And that sounds great. It won’t help the consumer but what the heck. And why are we doing all this, eBay?
While I was reading all this in an article, it occurred to me that if they had bigger profits and were still cutting jobs, there had to be a reason beyond the two bywords. Just made sense. And I found it way down at the bottom of the article, just a couple of sentences. It pretty much said that they were buying three companies. This is happening as they are cutting jobs! The companies they are acquiring are: Bill Me Later which is an online payments company which will be part of Paypal soon. That’s already owned by eBay. Then there are two foreign companies: Danish classifieds site dba.dk and vehicles site bilbasen.dk. Did I mention the sales tag on these?
Bill Me Later: $820 million in cash and $125 million in outstanding options. Some savings here and plenty of efficiency, right?
Danish classifieds site dba.dk and vehicles site bilbasen.dk: $390 million in cash
And they needed to drop 1000 jobs to do this. Right.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
feel sorry for the all that will be terminated, anyway, thanks for the info.
Yes, the timing is awful. Thank you for visiting today.