EBay CEO: Here's How We're Going to Get to $300 Billion
After making a bold forecast of $300 billion in transactions in 2015, nearly double the 2012 level, eBay CEO John Donahoe said innovations in mobile technology are what's going to help them get there.
"Mobile technology is completely blurring the lines between what used to be called e-commerce—or online—and what used to be called retail—or offline," Donahoe said on CNBC's "Closing Bell" Thursday. "Now it's just commerce. And so it's a bigger market for our company."
(Read More: EBay Predicts $300 Billion in Transactions in 2015)
The CEO, who arrived at eBay in 2009 and put in place an ambitious turnaround plan, said the company expects to do over $20 billion of mobile commerce and payments volume this year.
"In the next two quarters, you're going to be seeing stores putting mobile touch-screens on their windows and inside their stores," he said. "You're going to see mobile being a connection between online and offline, and we're doing a lot of cool innovation in those areas."
(Read More: EBay Goes After Amazon With Fee Changes for Sellers)
Donahue said he wasn't threatened by fast-growing smaller competitors like Braintree, which has $1.5 billion in annual mobile payments, but said PayPal's size and dominance in the space won't make the company complacent.
"At South by Southwest two weeks ago, we launched our new developer platform, including the mobile-payments library," he said. "And what that enables developers and merchants to do is to bring PayPal's mobile capabilities into their mobile apps seamlessly and easily, and give consumers choice. They'll be able to pay and sign up to pay just by flashing a credit card."
"It's still early days in this," he added, "and PayPal's got a lot of innovation—both at the small end and at the larger end of retailers and larger retailers globally."
Ebay shares jumped 4.1 percent Thursday to close at $54.22. The stock is up more than 46 percent in the past year.
