Shares of eBay Inc. posted their steepest single-day percentage decline in a year and a half Thursday after the online marketplace issued a second-quarter forecast that struck analysts as underwhelming. The stock fell 10.0% in Thursday’s session, making for the worst single-day drop since it lost 10.1% on Oct. 24, 2019. The company’s outlook, as issued Wednesday afternoon, calls for a high-single-digit to low-double-digit decline in marketplace volume on a currency-neutral basis during the second quarter. “While revenue growth is expected to significantly exceed [gross merchandise volume] growth on ongoing advertising and payments catalysts, we view management’s outlook as likely to prompt concerns over sustainable GMV growth potential,” Wells Fargo analyst Brian Fitzgerald wrote in a note to clients while reiterating an equal-weight rating on the stock. He anticipates that GMV will “settle into the [mid-single-digit] range post-pandemic.” Wedbush analyst Ygal Arounian downgraded eBay’s stock to neutral from outperform following the Wednesday afternoon report, writing that there’s now “lower visibility” into what volume trends will look like as the pandemic subsides and people begin to do more outside the home. “We move to the sidelines as we potentially head into four quarters of negative [year-over-year] GMV growth,” he wrote.
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