 | | |  | Margaret
C. Whitman
Chief Executive, eBay
By
Nick Wingfield
Many professional managers brought in to run Internet companies didn't last far beyond the dot-com bust of four years ago. Margaret C. Whitman, eBay Inc.'s chief executive, is a clear exception.
Ms.
Whitman, 48 years old, joined eBay in 1998 when the Internet auction site had 30 employees and was known as a funky bazaar for collectors of Beanie Babies, baseball cards and other bric-a-brac. Now, eBay has more than 7,600 employees and owns online marketplaces around the world through which $24 billion of merchandise was sold last year. Collecting tolls on all those transactions has made eBay one of the most consistently profitable businesses on the Internet.
Ms.
Whitman made international expansion a top priority for the San Jose, Calif., company, and overseas business now accounts for 42% of eBay's revenue. Two of her most recent international deals, the acquisition of sites in India and China, could prepare eBay for years of growth in the two most populous countries in the world. She also doggedly pursued the acquisition of PayPal, an electronic-payments company that is now a crucial part of eBay's growth.
Ms.
Whitman came to eBay with a classic consumer-marketing pedigree, after working her way through the ranks at companies including Walt Disney Co., footwear maker Stride Rite Corp. and toy maker Hasbro Inc. Her corporate background brought a level of discipline and experience that eBay lacked at the time, but she also proved sensitive to the unique connection eBay's users have to the site.
"From
your earliest days, in most careers, you're trained to drive consumer behavior, to direct what happens," Ms. Whitman said in a recent interview. At eBay, "you have to be an excellent enabler."
For
instance, when Ms. Whitman's managers noticed several years ago that users were selling cars in categories dedicated to automobile memorabilia, she directed them to create a stand-alone category for vehicles and to promote services in the category that would encourage more shopping, like car inspection and shipment. EBay says its merchants sold $2.68 billion of cars and car parts in this year's third quarter, making the category eBay's largest.
Similarly,
when eBay made some changes to the organization of its pottery and glass category earlier this year, eBay sellers bombarded Ms. Whitman with thousands of irate e-mail messages. EBay rescinded the changes.
Her
success at eBay has raised questions about what Ms. Whitman might do for an encore. Her name has even surfaced in the speculation about possible successors to Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner, who has said he will retire from his current position by 2006. Ms. Whitman says she's too focused on eBay to have made any decisions on what comes next, but she includes teaching and philanthropy among the possibilities.
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