The eBay annual shareholder's meeting took place at the Silicon Valley Conference Center in Santa Clara, California, on Thursday morning. Two union organizations presented proposals regarding executive compensation and director elections, both of which were defeated. The other four agenda items passed.
eBay CEO Meg Whitman gave a presentation to shareholders after the official business of the shareholder meeting had concluded. Whitman kept her cool when her slide presentation technology experienced a glitch. "We have a history of technical outages," she joked.
Whitman outlined performance metrics for eBay and eBay International, and talked about eBay's push into China and eBay's PayPal strategy, but there were no new announcements. It's a great business model, she said. She repeated a message heard at the previous two days Developers Conference that Paypal is aiming to be the new global standard for online payments. Whitman wrapped up her speech by discussing the theme of eBay's advertising promotion and the theme of the eBay Live conference which kicked off Thursday in San Jose, "The Power of All of Us."
Nine shareholders asked questions:
How do acquisitions help eBay, wouldn't eBay consider giving dividends to shareholders;
What is the status of the orphan child Half.com;
How do the changes at Goolge affect eBay;
Does eBay consider pushing services on eBay.com;
Is the stock cheap, so should eBay buys hares back;
How can charities use PayPal and how is eBay marketing PayPal to the general public to increase awareness;
Has eBay partnered with NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to open markets in developing countries (to sell crafts on eBay);
As a businessman manufacturing in American, how can he market his goods to the China market, eBay China is not so efficient;
And a question about stock options.
Meg Whitman answered questions and called on her executive staff to field some questions. Some of the more interesting answers were that eBay sees Google as a strategic partner and works with Google to optimize natural search; and that eBay chose to work with Global Sources in China because they had a good track record with regards to authentic items. "We don't want to violate worldwide Intellectual Property rights," she said, implying their top competitor in China was inferior to Global Sources in that regard.
The annual shareholder meeting was audiocast and can be found online.
