EBay Inc. CEO John Donahoe, working to reignite sales at the company’s e-commerce site, said he’s open to the idea of splitting off its faster-growing PayPal division.
EBay would consider that step if PayPal no longer had synergy with the parent company, Donahoe said at a conference in Las Vegas. He said he regularly asks himself whether eBay is hampering PayPal’s development.
EBay expects PayPal’s sales to double to $5 billion by 2011, making the unit its biggest moneymaker. Donahoe has already made plans to offload a separate division — the Skype Internet-calling business — because it doesn’t fit with the rest of eBay. PayPal could follow a similar path, he said, without specifying a timeline.
“When I feel the business will be better off separately, we’ll do what we did with Skype,” he said.