EBay’s first quarter results surpassed analyst estimates, but the company’s core e-commerce business continues to show weakness ahead of its split from PayPal.
The company registered earnings of 77 cents per share, excluding some items, on $4.45 billion in revenue, coming in ahead of analysts’ profit estimates of 70 cents a share on $4.42 billion in revenue.
EBay’s stock rose nearly five percent early on in after-market trading.
Revenue at eBay’s core Marketplaces business — which includes all of its shopping sites and apps — fell 4 percent year over year to $2.07 billion. This was the first year-over-year decline for the business since 2009. It is coming off of 1 percent growth in the fourth quarter, marking a troublesome trend given that Marketplaces division will comprise all of eBay once PayPal is spun off and eBay Enterprise is sold, as previously discussed.
The business is feeling increasing pressure from Amazon and a host of startups focused on building marketplaces for individual categories of goods. The company’s also still feeling the effects of a 2014 hack as well as penalization from Google for its search engine optimization tactics.
PayPal revenue grew 14 percent in the quarter to $2.1 billion, surpassing Marketplaces revenue for the first time ever in a quarter. The Enterprise unit, which offers warehousing and e-commerce services to brick-and-mortar retailers, saw revenue increase 7 percent to $288 million.
Just as many e-commerce companies have been saying, eBay stated the results would have been much better if not for a strong dollar, which makes products sold by people in the U.S. more expensive to some overseas buyers.
More to come once the analyst call starts at 5 pm ET.
Update: eBay’s spin-off of PayPal into a separate public company company is expected to close in the third quarter of this year, the company said on its analyst call.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
