eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference Call March 4, 2024 3:40 PM ET

Company Participants

Jamie Iannone - Chief Executive Officer

Steve Priest - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Nathan Feather - Morgan Stanley

Nathan Feather

Great. Well, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us. My name is Nathan Feather and I am Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap Internet analyst. I'm excited to be joined this afternoon by Jamie Iannone, eBay's CEO and Steve Priest, eBay's CFO. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jamie Iannone

Thanks for having us here.

Nathan Feather

Great. Well, before we begin, quick housekeeping item. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/research disclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

And with that, let's begin.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Nathan Feather

So, you've recently evolved the company strategy to focus on reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts. I guess, can you break down the rationale behind that strategy and how you're developing features with it in mind?

Jamie Iannone

Yes. So, after all the work we had done laying the foundation over the last couple of years, we really set our sights on reinventing the future of e-commerce for enthusiasts this year on a three-pronged strategy.

The first is really focused around relevant experiences. We've been doing a lot of work on our focus categories, really driving experience for that buyer at that specific time, doing things to make our marketing communications more effective, and our focused category work has been incredibly successful. We've been growing at 4% year-on-year, and it's been great.

The second component of that is scalable solutions. When you think about the scale of eBay, a $73 billion business in 190 different countries, really driving new capabilities based on that unique scale. That's an advertising business that's now $1.4 billion. It's financial services and new products and global payments. It's leveraging our scale for things like eBay shipping throughout the world, and that's our second pillar.

And our third pillar is magical innovation, really designed around how do we create game-changing level experiences for the customer to take all of the hard work out of the buying and selling process on eBay. Now with some new generative AI capabilities, that's even easier to do and more magical, and that's the third pillar.

Those unique things, when you think relevant, scalable and magical at a marketplace that's focused on non-new in-season gives us a really unique ability to compete against that strategy.

Nathan Feather

Okay, great. Well, lots to unpack in there. I want to get more into it. But let's start by thinking about the macro. And it's been a challenging macro environment, especially in the U.S. and for discretionary purchases. And so, from what you can see, how is consumer sentiment shifted on the platform in 1Q, especially relative to the back half of '23? And then, are you seeing any difference in trends for enthusiast buyers?

Jamie Iannone

Do you want to take that one, Steve?

Steve Priest

Yes, I'll take that one. Good afternoon, Nathan. Thanks for having us. And so, I think it's -- I'd say it's been incredibly volatile macro environment over the last number of quarters. And as a reminder, about half of our business is based from the U.S., and half is outside the U.S. And that's based on where the seller is domiciled. Our second and third countries, the UK and Germany, are facing pretty significant macro challenges. And so, the consumers have stretched. We're seeing very significant inflation, high interest rates, and that's obviously having an impact on discretionary spend. And despite that, we can continue to execute.

As it pertains to the U.S. consumer, they are also seeing some pressure. And collectively, as we went into the fourth quarter, we were seeing some undeniable macro pressure as we sort of went into October and into the early parts of November. What we did find is as we got to late November and into the holiday season over December, customers were looking for value, they were looking for deals, and they certainly came to eBay. And so, we saw some momentum as you went through December. I was pleased with the result that we saw in the fourth quarter, around flattish GMV growth. And then, as we came into the first quarter, as we talked about on our earnings call last week, we did see some softness in January, which sort of came through as we started the year.

We also saw some pretty significant weather events in the Midwest and the U.S., which others had called out as some sort of headwinds to overall momentum. That did abate somewhat as we sort of went into February. But overall, I think it's clear to see that we are facing some macro pressures as the consumer continues to be pressured. But I'm really pleased with the levels of execution we've seen at eBay and the work the teams are doing to drive long-term sustainable growth.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. And in the last earnings call, you guided for FX neutral GMV growth to turn positive in 3Q or 4Q. Now, can you help us bridge the key items that gets you there? And then, what macro backdrop is assumed in that?

Steve Priest

It assumes a relatively stable macro environment. So, no sustainable change in terms of where we are today. I think what gives us a level of confidence, Jamie just talked about some of the momentum we're seeing in focus categories. We've invested. We've created that investment, and we've managed to sort of change the paradigm as it pertains to the focus categories.

The other thing I would say is that we've lent into certain markets. So, think about Germany, for example. We took the focus category playbook and we applied it to a specific market. Think about Germany. We did a lot of work on sort of local language capability. We looked at the sort of taking friction out for sort of sellers making easier return policies for our consumers and also looked at a local proposition for the German consumer. Again, by leaning into Germany, we saw significant changes to the trajectory of our German C2C business, which has continued to bear fruit.

The third element is the investments we're making overall on the horizontal initiatives for the platform. The influx of generative AI gives us the ability to invest and to sort of really change the paradigm for our customers.

And so, just going back to the original comment that I made with regard to the execution, the macro environment continues to be challenged. But under the hood, we're seeing significant momentum, and I'm really, really pleased with what that looks like. And that gives us some confidence to look towards positive GMV growth in either the third or the fourth quarter of 2024.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now I want to talk about something equally as exciting and the opportunities in AI. And so, I want to start on the supply side. How are you using AI to reduce friction in the selling process? And then, looking over the medium term, where do you see future opportunities to make it even easier to list and sell on the platform?

Jamie Iannone

Yeah. So, we're very excited for what AI can do for our sellers. And so, when you think about magical listing, V1 and now we're starting to roll out V2, it's really about doing all the hard work for the selling -- for the seller and about making those listings much more compelling. So, V1 for magical listing basically writes the whole description for you. So, for 25 years, you've had to explain the thing that you're selling. Now we take care of that. That's rolled out across our top five markets, across mobile, desktop, native, et cetera. And the feedback from our sellers is fantastic. We have incredible usage. Over 90% of them accept the content, some with edits, and it's fantastic.

The next version of that is actually just holding your camera up to the product and that's figuring out everything about that product, the title, the category, the attributes, writing the description for you, et cetera. And I've been trying this out. If I have a trading card I'm trying to list, just holding my camera there, it figures out this is a Steph Curry from this Warriors this year, it's a Prizm signature card, writes all about it, helps you with pricing. It really is magical. So, when I talk about that third pillar being magical innovations, that's what we're talking about.

Forever in retail, better pictures help things sell, right? Retailers spend a lot of time trying to take gorgeous photos, they hire people to take photos, et cetera. Now with the AI technology, we're able to eliminate the background completely. We just rolled out a new image background last year. Sellers love that feature. And what we're piloting now internally and will roll out starting this quarter, in Q1, is actually the ability to put that product anywhere. So, if we're selling a pair of sneakers, I can take them on this gray rug and put them on a hardwood basketball court here at Chase Center and make them look beautiful, that will really help drive conversion.

So, the whole thing is how do we make it easier to unlock inventory. There is so much inventory sitting in people's garages, closets, basements, et cetera. The average household has $4,000 of stuff that they could sell on eBay and less than 20% of that is online, bringing that inventory online is a massive opportunity for us. At the same time, I had a larger seller tell me earlier this week. She's like, for the same person listing, they used to be able to list 150 products a day, now they can list 300 products a day, I'm going to be able to bring a lot more inventory to eBay with the same number of people working on it. So, really excited by the potential on the selling side.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. And staying on AI, but flipping over to the demand side. What are the one or two areas where you feel AI can really improve the shopping experience for buyers and drive conversion and retention?

Jamie Iannone

There's a ton. If I think about the work we've been doing in AI and search for a long time and now the ability to build a product knowledge graph with much better precision leveraging generative AI, it can really help the search recall and relevance that we drive there. Similarly, in search, computer vision is so much more powerful leveraging AI.

So, let's say, a woman comes on and finds a beautiful black cocktail dress that has flowers on it and wants to find something just like that, rather than having to describe that, et cetera, she can just use visual search and say, "Find me everything that looks like this item," it's really compelling.

We're doing some things in Parts and Accessories. Parts and Accessories is one of our biggest categories. It's over $10 billion on eBay, and we have over 100 million vehicles stored in My Garage. So, we're building technology that says, based on the maintenance requirements of what we estimate, here's the parts that you need, they're guaranteed to fit, you can buy them on eBay. We launched something two quarters ago, which said, if you own this type of car for an enhancer, here's the key improvement projects they can do, people fixing up their Ford Bronco or they're Honda Civic helping them. So, we're finding all kinds of different ways to use demand signals.

Remember, the unique data value of the asset of eBay is we have 25-plus years of data we can put it inside our own LLMs or leverage open source LLMs, do at a very effective cost structure and give you really game-changing experiences on the platform. I'm excited to be CEO of this company at this period in time with the scale and breadth of things that we have to work on to just make the customer experience fundamentally different.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now thinking about buyers and the active buyer contraction that had happened for a little bit due to the strategy shift towards enthusiasts along with some industry-wide headwinds coming out of COVID. They've largely stabilized over the past year. Do you think we've reached the bottom for active buyers? And going forward, where in the priority stack is re-expanding the buyer base?

Jamie Iannone

Yeah. So, we feel really great. The numbers of our buyers are exactly where we expected them to be, which was I have been signaling, we thought we'd see a stabilization of our enthusiast buyers. And enthusiast buyers is what we really focus on, because these are people that buy at least $800 or six times a year. The average purchase amount for those people is $3,000 in a year. So, you're looking at membership-level spend without a membership program when you look at the volume of what they're spending. And what we're seeing is that they're engaging more. The metrics that we have like enthusiast buyer is a 12-month trailing metric, but we talked this quarter that acquisition, reactivation and retention are all positive year-on-year and where we want them to be.

And the unique part of eBay is the cross-category shopping nature of eBay. So, if a sneaker buyer comes in and they're an enthusiast buyer buying sneakers over $100, they will buy $400 in sneakers, but they'll buy $2,000 elsewhere across the business. And that cross-category shopping nature is really powerful for the business and what drives long-term growth and health is driving that. So, we feel really good about where things are.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now thinking about advertising revenue, that reached more than 2% of GMV last year on the back of continued Promoted Listings traction. Focusing for a second on Promoted Listings standard, what do you see as the potential for further expansion within that product across increasing ad rates, expanding seller adoption and growing ads per seller?

Jamie Iannone

Yes. The Promoted Listings standard has really been the largest contributor to our advertising growth. Even though it was launched eight years ago, we continue to innovate on that product quarter after quarter. For example, this quarter, we launched a new thing called a top-picks carousel, which shows from our best sellers the most relevant inventory in search results from that perspective.

In addition, we keep making the product easier to use, taking the hard work from sellers and just making it really, really simple. And we continue to see a lot of opportunity. If you think about it, we have now 2.9 million sellers that have used at least one of our ad products across 900 million listings of our 2 billion listings. So, there is still significant potential opportunity for expansion and penetration within our advertising products and finding more ways to make it more easier and more compelling for our sellers to use it has been an important priority for us.

We hit a penetration. What was the penetration we hit?

Steve Priest

2.1%.

Jamie Iannone

2.1%. And we see a path to 3% penetration of advertising. We've doubled it from 2019 to this year to $1.4 billion. So, we feel really good about the progress on our advertising team.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now flipping over to the other core product within the Promoted Listings stack and your cost per click product Promoted Listings Advanced. That product has gained a lot of traction since you launched, officially was moved out of beta last July. Anything you can share in terms of seller adoption there? And how it's being used relative and complementary to Promoted Listings standards?

Jamie Iannone

Yes. So that's our CPC-based product, Promoted Listings Advance. And it's the fastest grower in the product portfolio last quarter and the largest contributor to sequential growth as a part of the advertising portfolio. And what's great about this product is it opens up more advertising dollars for people really trying to move velocity or grow their brand from that perspective. And every single quarter, we've always had great adoption from our largest B2C sellers that were sophisticated and know how to use it. But every quarter, we've been trying to build more features to make it easier for all of our sellers to adopt this product.

So, three quarters ago, we launched a product called suggested campaigns, where we did the work figuring out what are suggested campaigns that you could launch. Two quarters ago, we launched a product called smart targeting, where you would basically set your parameters for what you wanted to do and the decision rules in AI would actually do the bidding for you on your behalf with a lot more intelligence.

And then, last quarter, we launched something called rules-based decisioning, which lets you select which listings you want included in the giving campaign based on the category or the price point or different parameters that you have. So, think about us as evolving the selling side to just make it incredibly simple for adoption and easy to drive.

On the buy side, we've just been building a new AI technology, leveraging our product knowledge graph to optimize the experience that we have for buyers and how we put them in front of buyers. So, one example is, now when you're searching for an item and you're looking at recommendations, we'll often say, "Hey, what size shoe are you looking for? What size dress?" The buyer will put that in. And then all of a sudden, we'll have really targeted recommendations just in their size or just in that specific shoe size that they have on the platform.

So, continuing to push forward to really drive that innovation within the portfolio. And so, we see continued great runway of growth of opportunity in that product.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. And thinking a little more holistically about take rate, that has seen a lot of expansion due to both advertising but also payments and eBay International Shipping, increased final value fees, et cetera. That take rate does appear to be slowing its expansion a little bit. Revenue is expected to outpace GMV by about 2 points this year versus about 5 points last year. So, where do you see as the primary levers for further take rate expansion? And thinking long term, what take rate levels do you think are achievable for the business?

Steve Priest

Hi, Nathan. I've been really pleased with the momentum we've seen over recent years in terms of that take rate expansion. We lent into payments to start with that program obviously become much more mature as we've implemented it across the $73 billion of GMV on the platform. Jamie talked extensively about advertising going from strength to strength to being over $1.4 billion.

The other thing that we did last year was lending to eBay International Shipping. Not only did this unlock a lot of friction for our sellers and open the aperture up to over 132 million buyers across the platform, but it also gave us the opportunity to expand our take rate. And so, we are lapping through Promoted Listings growing over 30% in 2023. The momentum we saw from eBay International Shipping as you get into 2024. But I am pleased that we continue to see and anticipate take rate expansion as we go through this sort of financial year.

And when we went on to earnings last week, we talked about revenue outpacing GMV by around 2 percentage points that leans in towards that take rate expansion. We do expect to see Promoted Listings continue to expand in 2024. We are pulling back on some of the 3P advertising and deprecating that to help support our buyers and sellers on the platform. And also, we will continue to see some momentum for eBay International Shipping as we go through and -- expand that as we go forward.

So very, very pleased with the overall sort of take rate dynamics. The investments we continue to make at eBay are ultimately focused on driving long-term sustainable GMV growth. And so, as I mentioned, we will invest in payments, we will invest in advertising, we'll invest in various products. And it's not so much about driving take rate expanding. But overall, profitable GMV for the overall platform. So, we will continue to prioritize that. But I think the financial model speaks for itself in terms of just how robust it is, not only in terms of the revenue that it generates, but the margins that were attributable to that and the earnings growth that we laid out last week.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Certainly. And I want to double click on one of the things [indiscernible] take rate expansion last year in eBay International Shipping. How is seller adoption for that program compared to your prior shipping program? And can you walk through some of the early P&L impacts given that you know the principal in shipping those items?

Steve Priest

Yeah. It really is about unlocking friction for sellers and opening the aperture. So, think about a seller that's based in San Francisco and want to sell a product to New York versus selling a product to a buyer that might be in Frankfurt in Germany. Before there was a lot of friction for those sellers where they had to deal with duties, they have to think about shipping, they have to think about returns. And through eBay International Shipping, we've taken the friction out of that process for the seller. So, it's as easy to sell internationally as it is domestically. As a result of that, we've opened up over 400 million listings in the U.S. that traditionally were just domestic and open those up to our international sellers. And that gives more inventory, gives more choice to the buyers on the platform and ultimately makes eBay healthier.

But in addition to the strategic benefits, we got financial benefits associated with that. We talked last year about eBay International Shipping initially been a drag on our overall architecture as you went from an agent to a principle of that relationship with our shipping suppliers. As predicted, in Q4, it was no longer a margin headwind for us and sort of got back to corporate levels of margins in the fourth quarter. And going forward, we see this, again, both as a strategic opportunity to drive trust and to take friction out of the platform, but also to drive opportunities with regards to income accretion for the business.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now shifting over to the expense side. Since 2020, you see a few years of adjusted operating margin compression with full year '23 coming at around 27%. Now you're going to see that to flip back to positive in '24 with 60 basis points to 100 basis points of expansion year-on-year. Can you talk to the areas of cost savings that you're finding? And how should investors think about the margin trajectory through the year given the pace of reinvestment?

Steve Priest

We've been very disciplined about how we think about our cost structure as you think about leaning in the short term to drive operational efficiencies, again, to enable us to invest to drive long-term sustainable growth for the business. Specifically pertaining to sort of 2024 and just to unpack that for a moment, we did get a tailwind from the accounting change of about 40 basis points but that was offset by FX headwind of about 50 basis points for this year. So that's our wash.

When it comes to the 60 basis points to 100 basis points of margin accretion that we're targeting for 2024, that's really a function of some of the cost efficiencies we've talked about. We're driving efficiencies in our overall cost of payments on the platform. We're driving efficiencies as a result of the recent action, we talk around our workforce, not only to drive agility, and to drive speed on the marketplace, but also to create cost capacity. And in addition, we've been talking to the investors about our structural cost program over the last three years, which again is driving capacity for us to invest in the business.

And so for 2024, we've created a load of capacity that we can invest in the business, we can invest in generative AI that Jamie talked about earlier, we can invest in the customer experience and at the same time, expand margins at a range of the 60 basis points to 100 basis points. Where we fall on that range of the 60 basis points to 100 basis points will really be a function of what opportunities we see in terms of good return on investment. And so we could end up at the lower end of that range at the 60 basis points. If we saw ample opportunity to invest in accretive projects to drive top line sustainable growth for eBay. And so I'm pleased that the business is leaning in to create the capacity, drive margins and put us on the right path for growth.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Now there has been a lot of investor concern around the impact of a few large exporters coming in and really pushing up ad rates, particularly on performance. Are you seeing much of any impact from that dynamic on the marketing and demand side?

Jamie Iannone

Yes, we're not at eBay. If you look at what's unique about eBay is the massive amount of our traffic is organic traffic. You see they're typing in eBay.com, or showing up on the app or coming through search engine optimization. And so, we have a very -- a much, much smaller percentage of paid traffic. And so the impact of paid that I think some others are seeing, we see less of that. In addition, a big part of our paid is actually through our affiliate network. So I think someone writing a sneaker blog that puts out our sneakers listing on them. So less susceptible what's happening there.

I think the other big differentiator is we're really focused on non-new in-season and going after our strategy of what we're focused on, which is 90% of our inventory in the marketplace. In that non-new in-season, so that's pre-loved, that's refurbished, that's maybe last year's fashion or other goods along those signs. So, a pretty differentiated strategy. I think many years ago, we had some of the more lower quality or low ASP items, but we've really been shifting away as we focus the organization on non-new in-season strategy.

So, we're really leaning into the focused categories and the efforts that we have to be successful and haven't really seen an impact from some of those players.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now thinking in terms of the marketing spend that you're doing, you've shifted some of that to target enthusiasts specifically. How has that spend performed? And then going forward, how do you think about the marketing mix between overall brand spend, spend on specific categories and then performance?

Jamie Iannone

Yes. So, we shifted our strategy. We really focused on full funnel marketing, really targeted going after these enthusiast buyers. So, in this country, you may see us at the New York Auto Show or with the car enthusiast talk about what we're doing in Parts and Accessories. If you're based out of the U.K., you may see us on Love Island talking about what we're doing in fashion to bring enthusiasts on to that marketplace. In Germany, you'll see us talking about P&A, green parts and what we're doing in Parts and Accessories. And that full funnel really allows our lower funnel to work better.

In addition, we've just been expanding the portfolio of how we market, much more social media, paid influencers, driving really relevant experiences in terms of the marketing spend that we are putting to work. And the key parts of our business that are really unique is that when we acquire an enthusiast in one area -- I gave one stat earlier. I'll give you a stat from Parts and Accessories. Parts and Accessories buyer will come in and buy $500 in Parts and Accessories, but then they'll buy $700 outside of Parts and Accessories. So, as we acquire people into our enthusiast categories and focus categories, that spend actually translates across the whole business. And that's one of the really unique components.

The last thing I'll say about marketing is that by definition, most of our acquisition, reactivation and retention, which I mentioned, were all positive, are driven by word of mouth. So the more we change the CSAT and the NPS and the experience, the more we drive that overall word-of-mouth benefit of marketing on eBay, which has been true for 25-plus years. So, Steve talked a little bit about the efforts that we made in Germany last year to really drive that business. We had a 20-point -- over 20-point increase in CSAT. In the focused categories that we've gone after, we've seen a double-digit increase in CSAT and similar numbers in NPS. And so that really fuels the kind of marketing capabilities.

The last thing I'd say, Nathan, is we're spending a lot more time on how do we leverage our sellers and AI to do a much better targeted level of marketing. So now, for example, sellers after they put their listings up with one click can push them to their Pinterest or their Instagram accounts. We write all the copy for them using generative AI. So just making it easier for sellers to do marketing on their behalf, opens up a bunch of new opportunity for us as well.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now I kind of touched a little bit more on some of your other Promoted Listings products beyond standard and advanced. So thinking about the two others in terms of Offsite and Express, long term, what's the opportunity for those products? And where are they in terms of development and adoption today?

Jamie Iannone

Yeah. So, we feel really good about them. I would say Promoted Listings Advanced has been the strongest of the three new products that we launched over the last, let's say, 1.5 years. But let's take external Promoted Listings as an example. What this does is it doesn't constrain us to the inventory that's on eBay, but opens up the world of inventory out there to work with our advertisers, to put their inventory on all of these canvases. That could be a sneaker blog. It could be social media. It could be other places that we want to push those listings out to could be through our partnerships with search engines. And so, we're excited by the potential of what that means.

eBay is really -- since I've been back, we focused less on 3P advertising on our own platform. That's been a declining percentage of our business. It continues to expand and we think that's a really healthy thing for the business because we have such strong 1P growth. I mean 1P grew 25% FX neutral -- sorry, advertising grew 25% FX-neutral and our 1P business last year grew over 30%. So, the combination of what's happening on eBay with our off eBay products is what I think gets me the most excited.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now I do want to touch a little bit on one category that's been particularly successful in motor Parts and Accessories. Now that's been growing in line with the market on the back of a lot of innovation there with the highlight, at least in my view, being guaranteed Fed. Looking to '24, what's the roadmap to sustain or accelerate market share within that category?

Jamie Iannone

So first off, it's one where our full funnel marketing approach has worked really well in every country that we've been in. So, we've seen multiple quarters now of that business growing mid-single digits in line with market rates of growth, which is great to see. We continue to launch new innovations in that platform. Last quarter, we launched multi-warehouse shipping estimates. So, now if you're a larger B2C seller in that category who has multiple warehouses, we can shorten the estimated delivery time that we show to the buyer, helping them drive conversion. Early results of that are fantastic.

As I mentioned, we launched a number of new AI features, leveraging the fact that we have over 100 million vehicles in My Garage, the predictive maintenance, search engine codes when you have one of those warning lights come on, we'll tell you what parts on eBay to use, the upgraded piece that I recommend -- that I talked about, we've been improving fitment and fitment associated with recommendations that we have inside of P&A. So, every single quarter, we're building new innovations to make that experience better because we don't just focus on new focus categories, we also invest back in existing focus categories that we've launched like Parts and Accessories.

And I think it's a great example of showing the playbook is global, showing the playbook that we have is durable, year after year, we're able to see those sustained results. And it's one of our largest categories. At eBay, we have over five categories that are over $10 billion, Parts and Accessories, fashion, electronics and collectibles. And so, when you think about the size of that category and able to grow it at market rates of growth, we feel really good about where it is.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now bringing that all together, you've made a lot of investments into the user experience over the past few years with the focus category story and now evolving with the magical innovations. How do you think about finding the right trade-off between GMV growth and margin?

Jamie Iannone

Yeah, I'll start and then Steve can jump in. Look, I think when I came back, eBay had too much of a one size fits all, and we weren't investing enough in the product and technology, because we were complacent with the scale that we had. When we got really focused on where we have a right to win, non-new in-season. And then category by category, I said how do we have the leading customer satisfaction, that experience, that's what's been driving it because the GMV growth follows that movement in CSAT that we've seen. And so those investments, we really like the ROI of them.

We did the same thing in payments where every quarter we've been innovating, driving a lot of value back, not just in the growth of what we've done in the payments business, but how we use payments to drive GMV on the platform, whether that's split payments that we launched for high ASP or the integrations with Afterpay or Zip or Klarna, they do, at the same time, innovate not only to drive revenue and profit for the company but to help drive overall GMV of the business.

Anything you want to add?

Steve Priest

Yes, I'd just say, as investor, I will be focused on two things. Number one is driving profitable top-line GMV growth. And then secondly, it's about bottom-line earnings dollars, if I'm an investor in eBay or a potential investor in eBay. As I think about the way that we lead the company, we create capacity to invest through driving those cost efficiencies within the business that we talked about earlier. And that investment will stimulate those things.

The second thing I would say is reflecting on the earnings targets that we put out for 2024 last Tuesday. Number one is turning GMV positive in either third or fourth quarter of '24. We talked about margin expansions between 60 basis points and 100 basis points. And then including a healthy capital returns and capital allocation, growing earnings between 8% and 10%. So, we're focused, I believe, on the right things, and that's really about having the right balance between investing in the business and also driving earnings to the bottom-line.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. Now, I do want to touch on your stake in Adevinta and capital allocation. So, to the extent that, that sale closes, can you walk through the anticipated proceeds and allocation, your remaining stake and any potential tax implications of that?

Steve Priest

Yes. So, we were pleased to support the proposal from the consortium led by Permira and Blackstone, so to take Adevinta private. What this entails is that eBay will sell 50% of the stake in Adevinta and gross proceeds would be around $2.2 billion. The deal did pass the threshold of shareholder vote over recent weeks to over 90%, but it remains subject to regulatory clearance, which is still ongoing. So, we just need to bear that in mind.

The $2.2 billion that I talked about is gross proceeds. The investment has a low basis. And so, we do expect significant gains associated with it. And then assuming the deal gets executed, the tax -- post tax proceeds would be a result of taxes applied that you should assume the general corporate rate. In addition to that, the consortium just has an option to take another 10% of the overall investment, but that's at their discretion as an option to take it forward.

So, this is another example of eBay really thinking about our investments, looking at monetizing those investments to drive healthy returns to our shareholders. And I'm pleased that the teams are doing such a great job looking and running that business to realize those gains.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Now one last one. We got a few minutes left. Jamie, Steve, what are the one or two things you think investors most underappreciate or misunderstand about the eBay story?

Jamie Iannone

Yeah. So I think one is when you look at the scale of eBay, we're talking a $73 billion of GMV, export about 190 different countries, 132 million buyers in all the categories that we operate. And you combine that with the innovation that's happening in the business and what's possible because of generative AI right now and the level of innovation that we're able to drive, it's truly astounding. And we've been working over the last couple of years on our tech velocity and on the AI infrastructure. And I think to really understand -- I mean, last year, we increased tech deployments by 40%. We increased engineering experiments by 75%. We've been working a lot on just driving the innovation.

And when I look at the pace of innovation of what's happening now, it's very compelling. But more importantly is I feel lucky to be CEO of this company right now with the generative AI technologies that are coming to fruition because we've bucketed into 3 pieces: one, which is how do we fundamentally change the experience on eBay to make it more magical, more relevant for a broader set of customers. And we're just at the earliest stages of what's possible, magical listing, better background, better enhancement what we can do on the buying side.

Secondarily is we have this very unique data asset of over 25 years of incredible e-commerce, interest, purchase, pricing data which, when wrapped with that generative AI layer, if you think about it as an LLM is super compelling. And we're in a state now where we're building our own LLMs, we use open source LLMs. We're doing it at a cost infrastructure that is the same as historical cost infrastructure, that is really exciting.

And the third is that it can fundamentally change how we work as a business. Think about everything from all of our engineers are now on Copilot tools like most other technology companies, but eBay deals with a lot of customer support between buyers and sellers. And that customer agent sometimes had to read like a 12 paragraph e-mail where somebody explained it, we would hire someone to read that. Now we have AI read that e-mail, write the initial response. So it's fundamentally changing our pace of how we work and the pace of innovation.

And the combo of those, to me, and what's happening at the company sets us forward with great growth coming off of the proof points that we've talked about today in this conversation, Nathan, with what's happening with focused categories, what's happening on our horizontal investments.

Steve, anything you want to add?

Steve Priest

For me, it's the earnings power of the business. If you think about we have incredibly healthy margins, we have a fortress balance sheet. We generate around $2 billion of free cash flow over a year. We have the ability to drive healthy capital returns to shareholders while continuing to invest in the business. And the size and scale of eBay just really propagates that

prop against that ability because the scale that we have enables us to drive significant cost efficiencies and invest where others can't. Jamie talked extensively about generative AI. Last week, we talked about our CapEx guide between -- being between 4% and 5% of revenue and the ability to invest between $400 million and $500 million in our CapEx to drive generative AI. Not many of the companies can do that like us because of our scope. So, I'm very, very happy with the architecture that we have. And I think our financial structure gives us a distinct advantage.

Nathan Feather

Okay. Great. We'll leave it there. Well, Jamie, Steve, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

Jamie Iannone

Thanks, Nate.

Steve Priest

Thank you, Nathan. Good to see you.

Nathan Feather

Thanks.