While the e-commerce giant goes through a period of consolidation, its Ireland site leader Siobhan Curtin outlines its vision for the future to George Morahan
When eBay established operations in Ireland in May 2004, the company had a market capitalisation of more than $58bn, dwarfing its nearest rival Amazon ($19.6bn).
In the intervening 20 years, Amazon has become essential to daily life for millions of people, selling a wide inventory of products at below-market prices with offers of same- or next-day delivery, and expanding into web hosting and streaming.
Amazon ($2 trillion) now rivals Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet as one of the world’s most valuable companies while auction site eBay, a staple of the early internet years, saw its market cap peak in late 2004 ($77.9bn).
It is now hovering at around $27bn.
With 132 million buyers around the world and 543.8m monthly visitors to its website, compared to Amazon’s 2bn+ (eMarketer), eBay is still a global giant, but the …