[bluedevil2k]

Spinning off PayPal really hurts the long-term growth potential of EBay. They haven't grown much at all over the past few years, once you take out the PayPal revenue. That will really hurt the stock price. Meanwhile, I would expect PayPal's stock price to grow as it's potential for growth is pretty large. Will be very interesting to see how they split the existing EBay shares for shareholder and at what price.

[foobarqux]

> Spinning off PayPal really hurts the long-term growth potential of EBay. They haven't grown much at all over the past few years, once you take out the PayPal revenue.

But, as a current shareholder, you will still own PayPal and Ebay shares. The question is whether they are better together or better apart. There isn't any obvious synergy between the two anymore.

> Will be very interesting to see how they split the existing EBay shares for shareholder and at what price.

No, there is nothing interesting about that. Each shareholder get X shares of Ebay, Y shares of Paypal and Z dollars of cash. The price of the shares is set by the market. The values of X and Y are pretty much arbitrary.

[adventured]

eBay has most of the profit in the business. PayPal has sales growth, but is nowhere near as profitable as the eBay auction platform. There's no doubt the market wants access to PayPal's growth, but eBay is the profit machine in that relationship. eBay's platform margins are extreme.

PayPal will have to become five times larger to equal the profit that eBay spins off. Perhaps they can pull that off, but it's going to take a decade or longer.