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Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Mar 3, 2025

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Good morning, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather. I'm Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap internet analyst, and I'm pleased to be joined this morning by Jamie Iannone, eBay CEO, and Steve Priest, eBay CFO. Thank you both so much for joining us today.

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Thanks for having us here.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Now, before we begin, a few quick housekeeping items for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And with that, let's begin. So Jamie, you're about to hit your five-year anniversary in the CEO seat. Congratulations. Can you talk through how the business has evolved over your tenure and the key priorities as we head into 2025?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, look, we made a significant pivot when I came back to really get the business focused on non-new in season. Massive TAM, huge growth potential. We also shifted it from a one-size-fits-all type of business to really focusing category by category on how do we build the leading CSAT in that category. We call those our Focus Categories, and that's been performing really well for us. Our Focus Categories grew over 5%. All of that was laid out by what I call the tech-led reimagination. And then last year, we rolled out a new strategy focused on reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts based on relevant experiences, scalable solutions, and magical innovations. And that's worked really well for us. We've had three consecutive quarters now of positive growth in the business.

Importantly, with all the new capabilities with Gen AI, et cetera, we've been able to invest horizontally across the business to help us not only in our Focus Categories, but also in our other categories. We call those our Core Categories. That's given us a lot of momentum in the business. It's really allowed us to transform the customer experience on eBay to be so different than what it was five years ago. It's allowed us to really make investments across specific geographies, across specific categories that have really helped fuel the underlying momentum of the business.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, and great. And before we dig into the micro and there's a lot I want to dig into on there, let's start with the macro environment. From where you sit today, how has the health of the consumer evolved over 2024 through the holidays and first quarter to date? And how should we think about the major differences by region?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Do you want to take that one, Steve?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Yeah, I'll take that one. So just to stand back, we have about $75 billion of GMV going through eBay on an annual basis. And our three largest markets, the U.S., the U.K., and Germany, account for 75% of that. I don't think it's any secret that Europe has been in a more challenged macro environment for some time. And as far as we look forward, we don't see any discernible change, or we're not forecasting or anticipating any discernible change in the overall macro environment. I think about the U.K. and Germany, as I say, our second and third largest markets. They've sort of seen pretty stagnant momentum over the last couple of years. For example, the Bank of England have recently come out and said they're expecting 75 basis points of GDP growth in 2025. Germany also pretty stable at like 30 basis points of GDP growth.

So we're not seeing much fuel from there. The U.S. has become, and we've seen a bit more resilience in the U.S. consumer, but there continues to be pockets of pressure. But having said all that, and I'll just stand back, Jamie alluded to earlier, we continue to see really good momentum in the business, whether it's Focus Categories going at 6% in the fourth quarter. Our Core Categories have been positive in the fourth quarter. We continue to execute, and I'm really, really pleased with the momentum that eBay has continued to drive.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. And looking backwards, 2024 was a hallmark year for eBay, returning to positive GMV growth. And can you recap the primary factors that enabled that return and the sustainability of those as we go through the next few years?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, look, one was the Focus Categories growth that Steve just talked about. So we've been seeing Focus Categories outpace the rest of the business. We grew 5% if you look at the whole course of last year in our Focus Categories. And that includes large businesses. Our Parts and Accessories business, think about that as the parts for you to sell for vehicles, is over $10 billion. And we've had a second year of it growing mid-single digits, which is healthy growth, especially in light of what's going on in the macro environment. We believe in total, if you look in aggregate over the course of last year, our Focus Categories actually slightly outgrew market growth. So that's been one key contributor. Second is we've been doing a great job with our full funnel marketing, attracting buyers to the site.

While it's not the core KPI we track, active buyers grew 1% last quarter, and that's helped us fuel what we do focus on, which is our enthusiast buyers on the platform. I'd say the other thing is that when I was here a year ago, investors asked, "We love your performance on Focus Categories, but can you get your Core Categories, which are the rest of the categories, to at least flat," which was the thesis that we laid out. And we did that. In fact, in Q4, our Core Categories were actually positive as well. And so we're seeing nice performance from the horizontal investments that we're making across the platform, whether that be in Magical Listing, in improving our shipping experience, in what we're doing in payments, and what we're doing in advertising that help lift kind of all boats across the marketplace.

So overall, all of those are giving us really nice momentum coming into 2025 based on the strategic work that we've been executing.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Now, your 1Q GMV guidance does imply a slight decel from 4Q. Can you touch on what's driving that along with the puts and takes for 1Q GMV growth? And given that, what gives you conviction in sustained low single-digit growth as we head through 2025?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

There's a couple of things I would call out on a quarter-to-quarter basis. We did see a good uptick in GMV momentum in the holiday period in Q4, and we talked about that on the call last week. The second thing I would talk about is the calendar events, and so we are lapping a leap year from 2023, which is about a point of headwind as we come into, sorry, from 2024. And it's about a point of headwind that we're lapping as we come into the first quarter of 2025, offset with some Easter timing that impacts that. So that's contemplated. The third element I would talk about is the underlying sort of macro environment and the uncertainty that's associated with it. We're all reading the news wires in terms of tariffs, in terms of de minimis potential changes, et cetera.

And we've contemplated. We've done a lot of modeling. We've done a lot of stress testing, and some of that is contemplated in our first quarter guide. So that gives the color in terms of how we've looked at it. But having said that, as we think about the different investments that Jamie's just talked about, whether that's in Focus Categories, whether that's in geo-specific investments, particularly in light of the U.K. and the momentum that we're seeing, or the underlying health of the business through horizontal innovation, that gives us confidence in terms of the sustainable growth that we've put out there for full year 2025 and the color that we provided last week.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

As you both touched on already, Focus Categories and relevant experiences have been a key pillar of growth. In 2025, where do you see opportunities for eBay to continue to differentiate the vertical experience? And how do you find the right balance of investing for vertical and horizontal initiatives?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, I think that's the right word, is balance. We find a balance between what are we doing on specific verticals or categories, what are we doing in specific geos, like the investments that we've made in Germany and U.K., and what are we doing horizontally. And what we see with Focus Categories is the opportunity to continue to expand them to new and new categories on the platform. The newest one is pre-loved fashion in the U.K. But at the same time, reinvesting back into categories that we've already launched. Take trading cards, for example. Trading cards is a category we launched several years ago as a Focus Category. But over time, we've been able to drive a continual innovation at really nice ROI. In fact, we saw this quarter in Q4 double-digit growth in our trading card business, and it was our largest contributor to growth.

That's because we've been investing in things like a partnership with PSA to make it really easy to actually send in an ungraded card, get it graded, and then get it sold on eBay all in one step without having to take that card back, resend it back in, relist it, et cetera. We acquired Goldin and Goldin Auctions. We acquired TCGplayer and have been driving nice growth in collectible card games. And so it's an example of a category where we're really innovating on a category level. But the investments in horizontal are paying off for us as well. So in that category now, we have a feature called Magical Listing. Magical Listing is basically hold up your phone to a listing, and we'll figure everything out for it.

This is now live to 100% of consumers in Germany, a majority of customers in our other major markets. If you take something like trading cards, I can hold my phone to a, let's call it a Pete Rose rookie card, and it will figure out everything about that card. It also does things like it pulls out the certification from PSA if it's a graded card and pulls in all of the data about PSA. That card was graded three years ago. It got a PSA 9. Here's the possession of it, et cetera. It's an example of how both our Focus Categories and our horizontal work can often be synergistic to really help drive the business. I'm excited for what we're doing in fashion. If you think about fashion on eBay, fashion is an over $10 billion category on the platform.

Up until a few quarters ago, you couldn't even say your size. There was very little discovery or inspiration. Now we're able to use generative AI to give you a Shop the Look and say, based on your size and based on your style, which is Scandinavian minimalism or athleisure, whatever it is, we're putting together outfits. We're putting together endless scrolls of feeds of what that is. And we've been doing over $10 billion because we have amazing inventory. Now that we can use these new tools through Focus Categories to show it off, I'm really excited by the potential of what that can be.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, and you brought up a couple of new Gen AI features there, and certainly, you've been one of the most active companies within e-commerce in testing and launching both Gen AI and GPU-enabled products. Over the past two years, what areas have changed the most in how the company's thinking about and investing in AI features along with how you're integrating those into the marketplace?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

I think the interesting thing, there's no part of our customer experience and no part of how we work internally where we're not considering or leveraging generative AI to make a dramatic step change improvement. So the example that I just talked about there was in selling. So in selling on the platform, not only can we do everything where we'll write the description for you, we'll figure out all the key data fields. We'll tell you how to price it because we have amazing pricing data of where you should be listing that product. We can also change the background. So we can take a picture on this carpet and put it on a gorgeous stand inside a beautiful landscape in a matter of under a second, really showing off the inventory. So there's so many applicable areas on the selling side to streamline that selling experience.

And my goal is to basically make it easier to sell on eBay than to throw out. So we can unlock the over $3,000 of inventory sitting in people's houses, and less than 20% of that is online. We're doing the same thing on the buy side with features like Explore, this endless feed of really relevant information based on AI. We're using it in our marketing for the subject lines that we write that can be really tailored to the long tail of inventory that we have on the platform in a really compelling way. And then when you look internally inside of the company, we're using it across the board. In all the areas you would expect, 90% of the queries we handle in customer support are self-service queries, which have gotten tremendously better with the use of generative AI.

Our marketing team was using it to generate all of the copy that we do for how we communicate with our customers. Our engineers, three quarters of them, use Copilot tools every day to make their jobs easier. Finance, legal, et cetera. All across the company, it's become a really important game changer to how we work as a company and how fast we can move and innovate. And I'm excited by both what we're doing for customers and how it's changing how fast we can innovate as a business.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

That's great. With those features also comes associated investment. Some of these products are expensive. Can you talk through how you're managing the incremental costs associated and your model selection strategy? Then on the early Gen AI features you have launched, how is that ROI compared to traditional product development?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

I think taking off what Jamie's just talked about, and I think about the overall ecosystem, we've now had over 10 million sellers use some of our AI features. We've got nearly 200 million listings that are over on the overall platform, and several billion dollars of GMV have come over to a lot of these AI initiatives, and so the investments are paying off, and we're leaning in. Jamie talked about both on the customer-facing side and for the company overall. We've driven a continued momentum around commercial models, around open source, and particularly our own large language models that we've developed in-house with best-in-class technology and infrastructure, and despite the levels of investments, we've only continued to drive between 4% - 5% of our revenue in CapEx, which is a real testament to the team.

And that's for the second year running while we continue to bring significant increases in GPUs into the architecture of the company. Our large language models are 100 times larger, but the efficiency and the effectiveness of those models are driving better experience for customers and ultimately driving better revenue. And so what I like about the eBay financial model, whether it's the OI generation, whether it's the strength of the balance sheet, we are using generative AI to continue to create capacity internally. We're able to drive efficiencies in terms of customer support, our engineers that Jamie talked about, all those support areas of the business. And what that does is creates capacity for us to reinvest in the business and then ultimately generate the increase in operating income, ultimately driving positive sustainable GMV, which we laid out in the color for the full year of 2025.

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

You asked about what is customers' experience with their satisfaction. If you look at features like Magical Listing, it has over a 90% customer satisfaction rating. Customers love the ease and convenience. Where we've rolled it out in a whole market, what we've seen is a double-digit decrease in the time that it takes to list an item, a double-digit increase in the completion of those items on the platform. And so it really makes kind of a huge difference to have all of the benefits of generative AI there. I think more importantly is when you look at it, and our goal is to make it so easy to unlock that inventory. I bet each one of you can think around stuff that you have in the house that if it's a few seconds, you'd want to sell that on eBay.

And if you can't think of anything, think of your spouse, because I'm sure you can think about your spouse having stuff that they could sell. Usually, that's an easier thought exercise for people. And when you think about the power of being able to unlock what's in people's closets, garages, basements, and bring it online because you can list it in seconds, that's a massive TAM that's generated by generative AI. And then you think about all the ways that we're changing the buying experience on the platform. Think about things like recommendations, right? For decades, recommendations have been built on technology that says, you bought this, you likely want to buy this. And it's been generally using kind of very interesting co-purchase data to create those recommendations. Well, now with generative AI, we can do so much more than interesting co-purchase data.

I bought my daughter an oboe on the platform, and there's amazing co-purchase data, but I certainly don't need to buy a second oboe, but what generative AI will tell you is the first thing you need to buy is some oboe reeds, and you need to soak them in water and then get an oboe stand, an oboe case, oboe books, et cetera, and so our ability to take this amazing long tail of inventory, we have 2.3 billion listings on the platform, and use generative AI to make recommendations more compelling, to make search more compelling, to make the description of those items more compelling is pretty fantastic.

It's why I feel excited to be CEO of this company right now with this technology is all of that 30 years of data plus what's generally available applied to our experience can really help the third pillar of our strategy, which I call magical innovation.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Really interesting. Now, you mentioned the 2.3 billion listings on eBay. Of that, 1.1 billion are promoted, so around 50% or so. Interesting to hear. Given the success you've seen in that business, effectively doubling the penetration over the past two years, what levers do you have to pull here? And how should we think about that mix between incremental number of promoted listings, increasing revenue per listing, and ramping the adoption of some of your new ad formats?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, look, we continue to believe we have a long runway of growth of opportunity for advertising. We grew our first-party advertising business 17% last year. And that's on the back of our existing products plus some of our new products. In fact, our product that's been around the longest, which is our CPA-based product, we call that Promoted Listings General. We launched that in May of 2015, so nearly 10 years ago. And that's still the largest growth driver today. So you see there's still massive opportunities, even our existing product portfolio. And then we have our newest products in CPC and Promoted Listings Advanced in Promoted Stores and Promoted Offsite, which have a lot of potential if you think what we created just with Promoted Listings General. The second thing I'd say is we continue to find a healthy ROAS for our sellers.

They're seeing a nice return on their ad spend. We're doing it in really smart ways where we're not increasing ad load on the site, but really driving better optimization. The last thing I'd say is that what we've been focused on is making the products easier and easier to use and adopt for our sellers. When we started rolling out our CPC-based product, you had to build your campaign. What keywords do you want to use? What's the maximum bid you want to have? All the different elements to run a CPC-based campaign. But we wanted to increase the penetration of sellers that could use it. Now we've used AI to really simplify that whole experience. Just give us your budget, give us what you want to accomplish, and we'll take care of doing that for you on the platform, which has been really super compelling.

Over the course of the last year, we rolled out a new advertising dashboard that every day gives you AI-driven suggestions about campaigns that you could be running or other ways to optimize your ads, so it's a long way of saying we continue to see a lot of potential in our advertising portfolio, in existing products, as well as new products that we've launched.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. Now, switching gears a little bit, in 4Q, you made UK C2C selling free and have launched a host of features to support that. We'll get to monetization in a minute. But first, what changes have you seen in seller acquisition, in behavior, along with demand since then? And how should we think about the applicability of those early learnings to help improve other areas of the marketplace?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, first, let me talk about why C2C is so important to us. I call C2C the inventory gold on the platform because it brings really unique inventory that, in general, a B2C seller is not selling. Think about: I bought my daughter a used oboe that had been 18 years old that had been used from one owner. No B2C seller has product like that. All of the unique inventory where a C2C seller is not trying to make a return on that, they just want to maximize the cash they're going to get for something lying around. So that's why we focused on C2C. And what we launched in the U.K. was a whole series of changes. We changed the fee structure where we eliminated final value fees and went to buyer fees. We made massive improvements in the listing experience.

We added a new feature called eBay Balance, where by default, when you go to sell something on the platform, that money ends up in your eBay Balance for you to use to shop. We added better improvements to our local experience and how we shopped locally on the platform. What we've seen is a 20-point increase since launch of new first-generation listings on the platform, of new and reactivated listers. We're seeing a higher ASP for C2C. People aren't bringing on their low-quality inventory. They're bringing on great inventory onto the marketplace. Overall, we've seen a double-digit increase in the GMV in C2C versus where we were prior to this rollout. We're really excited by what we're seeing. More importantly is some of the underlying behaviors.

We've talked about if you get sellers, buyers to sell, they're two to two and a half times more valuable as a buyer. eBay Balance is really helping that. Think about you go to sell a couple of things out of your closet, and you've generated a couple hundred bucks sitting in your eBay Balance. Most people now look at that as free money that I can go spoil myself and buy other stuff on eBay. That's exactly what they do. The majority of the eBay Balances are being used to buy stuff back on the platform, even though they have other options for how to use those dollars. We're happy with the metrics that we're seeing. We're still in the middle of ramping certain programs. Managed Shipping is the fifth element that I didn't talk about.

But in Managed Shipping, eBay does more of the hard work around shipping and providing items for customers. That's ramping up. We'll begin mandating that in Q2. But it's another example of taking all the friction out of the experience and making C2C a really, really healthy part of our business.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. On the remonetization, you mentioned managed shipping there. You also have the new buyer protection fee. Together, you know that those should lead the UK C2C take rate above where it was prior. Can you remind us the timing of how those fees ramped through 2025 and the impact to revenue and operating income? Then we've seen some other marketplaces struggle to add buyer fees. Can you touch on the demand elasticity you've seen and how it's altered the supply-demand balance?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Yeah, I'll cover that. So the one thing I would say that Jamie alluded to, we've been very thoughtful and very measured in terms of how we've rolled this out in our second largest market. And that's been very, very intentional. We rolled back the seller final value fees in the fourth quarter ahead of the holidays. We're very thoughtful about the communication to consumer to make sure that we did this in a very thoughtful way. We've then ramped the monetization or remonetization in the U.K. We started with the ramp of managed shipping through the fourth quarter. That will continue through this quarter and into the next one and ultimately begin mandating that in the second quarter. Also, with regards to the buyer protection fees that Jamie alluded to, we launched those a couple of weeks ago. And that's now at 100% in U.K. C2C.

So you're exactly right, Nathan. By the time we have fully wrapped this and gone through the whole process, our U.K. C2C take rate will be higher than when we started the initiative back in the fourth quarter of last year. As it pertains to the full year operating income and everything else with regards to eBay and monetization, advertising will continue to be an important vector of monetization for us across the platform. But when I think about our North Stars, it's about driving sustainable, profitable GMV growth and operating income dollars. That's what we think about every day about what we can drive on eBay.

I was pleased to be able to give the color last week as a result of the ramp in the overall U.K. C2C in terms of initiatives that we've talked about today and the continued ramp to drive positive operating income growth in 2025 and low-digit positive GMV growth for the year.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. Now, mentioning that guidance, you guided to flat, FX-neutral operating income margins in fiscal 2025, albeit with about 100 basis points of some one-off impacts. Over the medium term, how are you thinking about the cadence of margin expansion or contraction as compared to revenue and then GMV?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

We're very fortunate at eBay to have the financial architecture that we have. We have great operating leverage with the business. And when we grow the top line, that drives a healthy P&L. Again, I just go back to the point in which we're very, very focused on operating income dollar growth. You've talked about flattish margins in 2025. We've got about 70 basis points of net headwinds, really driven by three key factors. One is about the accounting change around the depreciable assets that we have and the life of those. Secondly, with regards to the managed shipping dynamic that we talked about. And then thirdly, with regards to M&A. And that's offset by some positive effects. So overall, flattish margins for 2025, 70 basis points of net pressure. But ultimately, it's about driving operating income growth for the enterprise.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. And on the gross margin outlook, number of moving pieces here: depreciation dynamics, the U.K. Managed Shipping launch, payment optimizations, ramping, Offsite advertising, et cetera. Can you help us just sort through some of the puts and takes here and what the shape of gross margin could look like over 2025?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, we don't ultimately guide gross margins. We've given some color with regard to operating income growth and ultimately operating margins. But you're exactly right. As we continue to look at things like the benefits associated with scale, the benefits of cost of payment initiatives, we've done a lot of work, not just in terms of wallet that Jamie talked about in the U.K., but other initiatives that are sort of driving efficiency in terms of overall cost of payment. And other items that continue to sort of drive the benefits, offset by some of those gross margin implications around Managed Shipping, traffic acquisition costs associated with the Promoted Listings Offsite mechanic. But I just go back to it, Nathan, which is about we will drive efficiencies and we will drive momentum in our business to look at operating income dollars.

There will continue to be puts and takes with regard to overall gross margins as we go through 2025.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, now, before we wrap, I have to ask about tariffs and de minimis. How are you thinking about the potential direct and indirect impacts of tariffs along with your ability to mitigate some of those? And connected, how exposed are you to changes in the de minimis exemption?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, so first on de minimis, let me size it. So if you look at our China business, about 5% of our business of GMV is China into the U.S. corridor. China overall is a little less than 10%. But three quarters of that inventory is actually forward deployed to the end markets. And so it's already applicable to the current tariffs that are in there. And of the other roughly 25%, about half of that is shipped through a service that we provide called SpeedPAK, which helps with tracking, et cetera, so also can take some of the complexities out. So the majority of that work being forward deployed was really already done by sellers because they wanted to shorten the shipping times and make it easier for customers in those end markets.

We feel good about our ability to navigate this in the guidance that Steve provided for Q1 and out. We've contemplated a number of range of scenarios of what could happen in what we've put forward, but there's two things that help. One is just the general marketplace elements of substitutability of demand across so many different markets, which helps us. The second is if tariffs do cause prices to rise, eBay is a great place to come for values on the marketplace. In general, what we've seen is that we're a little bit more resilient than other marketplaces or than other places in challenging times because of the used, the refurbished, people really wanting to find a value that's there on the marketplace, so we'll continue to do what's right to support our buyers and sellers in the marketplace.

As we saw during COVID, the vast breadth of sellers that we have causes a very dynamic marketplace, and in some ways that's helpful to us with changes to the system, but we feel well prepared to kind of help them navigate through it.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. Now, Steve, within the investment portfolio, you've had a variety of monetization events in the back half, selling a portion of your Aurelia stake, exercising the Adyen warrants and the Gmarket stake sale. How do those influence your thinking on the magnitude and timing of shareholder returns? And with those leading your cash and investment balance above $7 billion, can you recap your capital allocation philosophy more broadly and how M&A might fit into that?

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Yeah, and thank you for pointing it out. As I stand back, I've been really taken by the amount of returns that we've been able to generate for shareholders over the last couple of years. You're exactly right. We monetized our Adyen stake. We had two tranches of the Adevinta and then ultimately Aurelia stake that we managed to sell off during the fourth quarter, the second option that they had. And then obviously with the Gmarket investment that we had. As a result of monetizing those assets, over the last three years, as well as the operating cash flow that we've had, we've been able to return $9.2 billion to shareholders through repurchases and dividends over that period, which is about 150% of our free cash flow. We've been great allocators of capital. Our philosophy hasn't changed, and it will not change.

What we have ultimately talked about is generating at least $2 billion of share buyback in 2025, in addition to the quarterly first quarter dividend that we just announced, which was incremental $0.29 per share in the first quarter. Very pleased with the levels of monetization that we've driven and also very, very pleased about the levels of shareholder returns that we continue to generate.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, now, a few minutes left here. I want to ask you both, what are the one or two things you think investors most underappreciate or misunderstand about the eBay story?

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Yeah, I think probably one is just the momentum that we have in the business. If you look at Focus Categories, we believe we're actually gaining share in aggregate across those, growing 5%. And when you look at the market right now, if you look at U.K. and Germany, and those are our second and third largest markets, when you look at e-commerce growth rates last year, they were kind of flattish in a world where GDP is growing. The forecasts to grow 30 or 75 basis points in each market respectively. And we play more in discretionary e-commerce, which, as you know, is further kind of challenged. You see that from some of what our competitors are releasing.

So for us to put up kind of three quarters of positive growth in this macro environment with some of those headwinds in front of us really shows kind of the underlying health and strength of the business. You see a lot of our marketing efforts now, whether that's the work we're doing with influencers, with Emma Chamberlain or Margherita Missoni, the work we're doing in each of our geographies to talk about the value proposition, really engaging audiences across demographics. But the younger demographic is very focused on what we're doing, on sustainability, on used and refurbished. And that's a great tailwind for eBay's business, especially in markets like Europe, where they care much more about things like green parts and pre-loved, et cetera. So we're leaning into those tailwinds in a big way.

And then lastly, I'd say, is the opportunities that we have horizontally across the experience to change it with generative AI. I feel lucky to be CEO of this company right now with this technology because we have 134 million buyers. We have five categories on the platform that are over $10 billion. We service 190 different markets. So when you think about all the capabilities that this opens up for us to be able to market in a different way for our long-tail customers, to make it so simple to list products on the platform, we actually think the TAM of non-new in season will grow faster than new in season over the next couple of years. And we're tapping into that TAM on the platform.

When you think about the ability to change how we market to consumers using this technology, create differentiated experiences category by category, it's pretty exciting and compelling, and you combine that with our focus category growth work, and it shows you the real kind of momentum in eBay, so I'm excited to see what we'll produce. I think we're innovating at a faster pace than we ever have as a company before. The way we've adopted these tools internally to change our pace of innovation is exciting, and what we hear from customers is we love it. They're giving us 90% CSAT, so I think you're going to see us evolve over the next couple of years in ways that we've never done, launch new areas. eBay Live is one example. It's growing double digits quarter after quarter.

And it's another new way we're unlocking supply and going after the enthusiast buyers. And I think you'll see that be a bigger part of what we expose to our buyers and sellers over 2025 and 2026.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

OK, great. Jamie, Steve, thank you both so much for being here.

Jamie Iannone
CEO, eBay

Thanks, Nathan.

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Thank you.

Nathan Feather
Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Thank you so much. That was great.

Steve Priest
CFO, eBay

Thanks, mate.

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