eBay (EBAY) on China (quotes from the conf call)

eBay announced that profitability next year would be lower than analysts had expected. (The stock was whacked in after-hours trading.) Why? Because eBay plans to invest heavily in expanding in China and growing PayPal's business. Here's what EBAY said about its China expansion:

On recent developments:

China's Internet market is developing more
rapidly than we had anticipated and Ebay's growth has been remarkable.
In the past year the site more than doubled its user base... New
listings reached nearly 6.6 million while GMV reached more than $360
million on an annualized run rate. We also added over 1 million new
users in China for the fifth consecutive quarter having just broken the
10 million user mark last week.

On the China market and plans for future investment:

   

...China
represents one of the most important opportunities this company faces
today. It has an e-commerce market that is already measured in billions
of dollars. It has a middle class of 200 to 400 million people who are
becoming affluent consumers…

On the competitive landscape:

There are lots of players entering the market…
they have perfect twenty hindsight into what happened in Western Europe
and the United States and Japan and money is pouring in to build what
we think people will hope will be very valuable Internet franchises…

On profitability:

From an operating margin point of view I don't
think we have any reason to believe that long term it will look any
different than our more established market but I think there's some
time frame to get to those levels.

(Quotes from CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)