SEOUL, South Korea (AP) _ EBay Inc. will purchase a substantial stake in the operator of a leading South Korean online marketplace, a news report said Monday.

Online newspaper edaily reported that eBay will buy a 34.21 percent stake in Gmarket Inc. from Interpark Corp. and its chairman Lee Ki-hyong for $24 a share, or $413 million.

Edaily, which quoted an unnamed industry source in mergers and acquisitions, said the deal was clinched last week during a visit to South Korea by eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe.

The deal would make eBay the largest shareholder in Gmarket, the report said.

An investor relations official at online shopping mall Interpark, who refused to give her name, said, however, that there was “no assurance” of a deal, a position confirmed by company spokeswoman Lee Eun-young.

Paul Lee, general counsel for Gmarket, said his company was “not in a position to comment.”

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NEW YORK – LiveAuctioneers’ digital trade publication AuctionCentralNews.com (ACN) has marked its first half-year of operation as a potent new-media force within the auction, antiques and fine art marketplace. Combining original and Associated Press wire service news with custom-crafted features, outstanding columns and first-rate auction previews and post-reports, ACN is regarded by many as the authoritative voice of the auction industry.  

“LiveAuctioneers is in the business of identifying trends and originating new ones, and Auction Central News is the culmination of ideas we’ve had under development for several years,” said LiveAuctioneers CEO, Julian R. Ellison. “It’s a completely unique model, one that continues to evolve and improve. Because there was no ‘template’ upon which to base ACN, it unfolded in a completely original and creative way.”

Ellison said AuctionCentralNews.com is run by a small, hard-working team of professionals with decades of experience in antiques journalism. “Because it is an Internet business, it is also a global business, with correspondents in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe contributing to our world view of the auction sector.”

Auction Central News is filling a need whose time obviously had come, Ellison said. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase worldwide in readership and in the number of other Web sites that have been picking up our news through RSS feeds. We have a widget on the homepage that any Web site can install to start receiving incoming news on a continually updated basis. We are essentially a free news syndication service for the auction and antiques trade.”

 

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SAN JOSE, Calif. – Jeff King, eBay’s Senior Director of Finding, has confirmed through eBay’s Announcements page that the current search engine in use on eBay will be retired in April of 2009. A new search engine that King describes “faster and easier” will take over the job of scouring the world’s busiest commerce site.

“In a nutshell, it looks at a multitude of details in listings to deliver more of the results you want,” said King. “It makes it easy to browse and narrow your selection, and lets you choose how you want to see the results. With the new auto-complete feature it even ‘anticipates’ what you’re typing in the search box.”

King said suggestions from eBay users had contributed to the new search design. “The response from the community to the new finding has been great,” he added. “We’ve incorporated a lot of these suggestions already, and in the coming months we’ll be introducing more new features and enhancements to make it even faster and easier.”

Until now, eBay buyers and sellers have been given the option of using the new or old search engine. As more and more registered users adopted the new technology – 90 percent, according to King – eBay is now ready to take the permanent leap to the improved model. Those who are still using the original search-engine technology will receive messages during their searches to remind them that the changeover will occur in April.

Copyright 2009 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

NEW YORK (AP) – EBay Inc.’s fourth-quarter earnings fell 31 percent, indicating that its Internet auctions and “Buy It Now” offerings are being hurt by the recession just like traditional retail sales.

The results, combined with a forecast below analysts’ expectations, sent eBay shares skidding more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.

San Jose, Calif.-based eBay said Wednesday it earned $367 million, or 29 cents per share, in the quarter. That was down from $531 million, or 39 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.

Excluding one-time items in the most recent period, eBay earned 41 cents per share – 2 cents higher than the prediction of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

Revenue fell 6 percent to $2.04 billion, missing analysts’ expectations for $2.12 billion. The company said the decline stemmed mostly from the recession and the strengthening of the dollar. Deals done in other currencies now translate into fewer dollars.

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ATLANTA (AP) – Scholars and armchair academics alike can now browse an online listing of thousands of documents in the Martin Luther King Jr. Collection that further pull back the curtain on King’s life as a preacher and a person, officials at Morehouse College announced Jan. 13.

Archivists have spent nearly two years cataloging and digitizing the collection, which is housed at Morehouse, where King graduated in 1948. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin led an 11th-hour campaign to buy the papers in a $32 million private sale in 2006 that thwarted a public auction to be held at Sotheby’s in New York.

Morehouse President Robert Franklin called the collection a “powerful tool” for education and insight into King’s life as a man, theologian and activist.

“There is a wealth of transformative knowledge that we have yet to glean from Dr. King,” Franklin said.

The school touts the papers as “the most comprehensive collection of King’s personal writings and books spanning from 1946 to 1968.” About 7,000 pieces are handwritten items, such as the “I Have a Dream” speech, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and nearly 100 sermons from the 1950s and 1960s, including some never before published or studied.

The collection also includes items ranging from canceled checks, a term paper King wrote as a student at Morehouse and a well-developed draft of “The Drum Major Instinct” sermon, which he delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968, two months before his assassination.

An online guide to the items was made public Jan. 13. The collection itself is available for research on computer for visitors to the Robert W. Woodruff Library at the Atlanta University Center. Many of the documents are also expected to be the centerpiece of the city’s Center for Civil and Human Rights, scheduled to open in 2010.

Morehouse named Clayborne Carson as distinguished professor and executive director of the collection. Carson – a King scholar who was tapped by King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, to edit and publish his papers in 1985 – is the founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, where he also teaches in the history department.

He said the task in an enormous and exciting responsibility.

“This is a wonderful day for me, and an important day for the King legacy,” Carson said. “These are largely new materials, that can provide new windows into the life of a person we thought we knew well. We have only begun to educate people about King.”

Carson said he plans to focus on King’s significance as a world leader, to organize a series of seminars dedicated to discussing the meaning of the King legacy and to help young people explore constructive solutions to global issues.

Carson will retain his positions at Stanford as professor and director of the King Research and Education Institute. In his role at Morehouse, Carson will develop programming for public education and scholarly access to the collection, and teach a seminar on King’s life and beliefs.

Shawn Crosby, a freshman at Morehouse from Ohio, is considering taking the seminar next semester. The 18-year-old said he planned to search the collection at the library and looked forward to what he might learn from the documents.

“Dr. King was a really big reason for why I came to Morehouse,” Crosby said. “I got misty-eyed reading the Nobel Peace Prize draft. Looking at it (online), I felt like I was there with him.”
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On the Net:

Martin Luther King Jr. Collection Listing:
http://www.auctr.edu/mlk-public/public.asp

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-01-13-09 1820EST

NEW YORK (ACNI) – Over the weekend of Dec. 6 and 7, LiveAuctioneers.com’s Support Team specialists were called upon to provide emergency assistance after auctioneers began phoning in to report an eBay Live applet failure. Of the 52 LiveAuctioneers-supported auctions conducted over the weekend through eBay Live, 42 reported having difficulties with the applet – the onscreen window through which bids are transmitted to auction houses in real time.

“The first call came in to our emergency line around 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday,” said LiveAuctioneers’ client services manager John Tona. “The calls increased as more and more auctions started up. All of the callers described a slowness on the applet – that it was not responding.”

As auction traffic increased, the applet reduced to being completely unresponsive. “Anytime it’s an applet issue, we know the problem is on eBay’s end,” Tona said. He contacted eBay immediately after receiving the first trouble call and testing the applet to confirm there was a problem.

“Around 11:30 we received a confirmation from eBay that there was, indeed, trouble with their applet,” Tona said. “Initially, it was blamed on the high volume of traffic, but when eBay advised that they would resolve the problem by restarting their servers, we knew traffic volume had not been the cause.”

When the applet’s lack of functionality began to recur on Sunday, Tona again contacted eBay, only to learn that they had mistakenly restarted the front-end servers the day before. “In actuality they should have restarted the back-end servers. Once they restarted the correct servers, everything worked fine.”

The applet problem affected auctions intermittently for approximately two hours on Saturday and five hours on Sunday. “Auctioneers were frustrated, and some were angry, but they realized it was not LiveAuctioneers’ fault. We were trying to help them and had four Support Team members working ’round the clock to monitor the situation and keep auctioneers informed. One of the members stayed in constant contact with eBay.”

Many auction house representatives praised the assistance they received from LiveAuctioneers. Michael Whelchel, IT director for the Charleston, S.C., auction house Estate Road Show, said he gives “high marks to LiveAuctioneers. In the middle of this mess, they continued to answer the phone and help as much as they could, even though there was nothing they could do about it. If they didn’t answer the phone immediately, they’d call back within two minutes. Any other company would have given up. We know from this experience that we’ll be using LiveAuctioneers in the future … Of course, eBay Live was not answering their phone.”

Estate Road Show’s auction of fine and costume jewelry from the estate of the late Connecticut antiques dealer Louise Mondani Graham was halted when it became clear that Internet bids were not coming through properly. The rescheduled sale will take place on Sunday, Dec. 14, with an announcement of details soon to appear on the auction company’s Web site: www.estateroadshow.com.

Gulfcoast Coin & Jewelry of Ft. Myers, Fla., similarly canceled its major auction of high-end coins after a problem was detected. “Only nine or 10 items had sold through the Internet, which was unusual, and when we saw that there was only one bidder online for the types of important coins that were in this sale, we knew something had gone wrong,” said Barbara Mehringer, who handles all Internet transactions for Gulfcoast. “We had a call from France this morning from a person who was very upset that he had not been able to bid …We plan to relist the entire auction, intact, for next Sunday, the 14th.” Mehringer said that in spite of the frustration and disappointment they experienced, Gulfcoast was very pleased with the support they received from LiveAuctioneers.

Skinner’s live auctions specialist, Nicole Nicas-Rovner, said their auctions of Fine Oriental Rugs & Carpets don’t garner the same level of Internet participation as their other sales, but that it was “still a disappointment” when the applet froze during their Dec. 6 Rugs event. Nicas-Rovner suspected it was a traffic-related problem.

“(An applet freeze-up) almost never happens to us,” she said, “but earlier in the day I remember thinking it was unusual that so many sales were going on at the same time. Our sale started at noon, but our catalog listing didn’t show up till the second page of auctions on eBay because there were so many starting earlier that morning. The second time the applet locked up, I knew it was an online system problem. We called LiveAuctioneers, and they were very attentive. They always are.”

It wasn’t just auction houses that were upset about the applet situation. John Tona said LiveAuctioneers also received more than 1,000 phone calls over the weekend from disgruntled bidders. “Auction houses were directing them to us, which was perfectly appropriate, since the auctioneers didn’t know how to respond to their questions,” he said.

Tona said LiveAuctioneers anticipates receiving an official response from eBay soon that will pinpoint the cause of the applet malfunction. In the meantime, eBay is crediting back the catalog setup fees paid by all 42 auction houses that experienced a problem.

Julian R. Ellison, CEO of LiveAuctioneers, commended his team for the way in which they responded to the applet meltdown. “We have always prided ourselves in the level of customer service we deliver,” Ellison said. “During this unfortunate event, whose cause and remedy were beyond our control, we showed auctioneers that it’s not just hollow words when we say we care about their success and will support them 100 percent. After the 1st of January, LiveAuctioneers will implement its own state-of-the-art platform. There won’t be any more eBay Live. From that point forward, any problems that might arise will be immediately identifiable in-house, and it will be our team – not a remote company – that is responsible for rectifying them. We are absolutely ready for that responsibility and know that auction houses will be very happy with the prompt service they receive.”

Ellison added that this week’s edition of the LiveAuctioneers e-newsletter – which is sent out free to opt-in recipients every Wednesday – will include links to the electronic catalogs for all rescheduled auctions, as well as newly listed auctions. To subscribe, log on to https://www.liveauctioneers.com/news/newsletter.html.

Copyright 2008 Auction Central News International. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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NEW YORK (AP) – EBay Inc. posted a third-quarter profit that beat analyst forecasts Wednesday, but its lower-than-expected fourth-quarter outlook indicated the online auction site operator is not immune to the slowing economy.

The San Jose, California-based company’s shares fell 58 cents, or 3.8 percent, in after-hours trading, after finishing regular trading down $2.41, or 13.6 percent, at $15.33.

The fourth quarter is “going to be a challenging retail environment and we want to drive demand for eBay sellers,” eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said in an interview.

The company plans to work on this by spending more on sales and marketing during the period.

For the third quarter, the company had said last week that due to the weakened economy and strengthened dollar its per-share profit would be higher than it had predicted in July, but revenue would be near the low end of its expectations.

This was reflected in the results, as eBay earned $492 million, or 38 cents per share, in the quarter that ended Sept. 30. In the year-ago period, eBay reported a loss of $936 million, or 69 cents per share, stemming from charges to its Skype telecommunications unit.

Excluding one-time items, eBay earned 46 cents per share – five cents higher than analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected.

Revenue rose 12 percent to $2.12 billion, a bit lower than the $2.13 billion analysts anticipated.

Sales from the company’s marketplace segment – which includes eBay, Shopping.com, StubHub and other e-commerce sites – rose more than 4 percent to $1.38 billion.

The company’s PayPal unit logged much higher growth – 27 percent, with revenue rising to $597 million.

EBay’s number of new listings jumped 26 percent year over year to 700 million. But the number of active users – which is an important measure of how well it is doing bringing in new buyers and sellers – rose just 3 percent in the quarter to 85.7 million.

Analysts were troubled by eBay’s third-quarter gross merchandise volume, which refers to the total amount of money that flows from transactions on the site, as it declined for the first time, dipping almost 1 percent to $14.3 billion.

“Granted, what’s going on around us in terms of the macroeconomic landscape and heading toward a recession has to have some effect on the GMV, that’s a given, but you don’t really know how much is due to the overall economy versus what is company-specific,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Stephen Ju.

During the company’s quarterly conference call with analysts, Donahoe said the metric “was not what we would have liked but we remain confident in our overall direction and believe we’re on the right path.”

Going forward, EBay cut its full-year outlook, which put its fourth-quarter expectations well below analysts’. Among other things, eBay cited costly upcoming acquisitions and cuts to 10 percent of its workforce.

For the year, eBay now expects earnings of $1.69 to $1.71 per share on an adjusted basis. It’s also looking for $8.53 billion to $8.68 billion in revenue.

The company had previously expected a profit of $1.72 to $1.77 per share on an adjusted basis, and $8.8 billion to $9.05 billion in revenue.

Given this, the company is looking for a fourth-quarter profit, excluding items, of 39 cents to 41 cents per share in the period, compared with 45 cents in the fourth quarter of 2007. When excluding items, analysts had anticipated a profit of 47 cents per share.

The company also sees its revenue dipping, predicting $2.02 billion to $2.17 billion in revenue. EBay’s revenue totaled $2.18 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Analysts were expecting $2.43 billion in revenue.

“I think as the company tries to reinvigorate the core marketplaces platform it’s encountering more headwinds, and surely the fourth-quarter guidance is reflecting a deteriorating consumer spending environment,” Ju said.

And beyond that, Donahoe is not sure how long economic issues will persist.
“The thing about periods like this – and this is probably the third or fourth recession in my career – is you never know how long they’ll last or how deep they’ll go,” he said.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-CS-10-15-08 2035EDT