May 1 (Reuters) – GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer’s market value more than tenfold, the \u200cWall Street Journal reported on Friday.<\/p>\n
Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of \u200cabout $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion.<\/p>\n
GameStop \u200bhas been quietly building a stake in eBay’s shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n
If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company’s shareholders, the Journal said.<\/p>\n
Details of the potential offer, which could be \u200csubmitted as soon as later this \u2060month, could not be learned, the report added.<\/p>\n
Cohen, the largest investor in GameStop, and the companies did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.<\/p>\n
A potential \u2060deal would upend the usual M&A playbook. It’s rare for a public company to target one nearly four times its size; such deals typically rely on heavy debt, stock issuance, or both – banking on \u200bfuture earnings \u200bof the combined company to justify the cost.<\/p>\n
The billionaire \u200binvestor, who joined the GameStop board \u200cin January 2021 and became the CEO in September 2023, has steered the company through a period that saw its return to profitability through aggressive cost cutting.<\/p>\n
For years, GameStop has grappled with disruptions from a pivot to online shopping and digital purchases, forcing it to shutter many of its brick-and-mortar stores and focus on a web-based reinvention.<\/p>\n
It reported a 14% drop in revenue to $1.10 billion \u200cfor the holiday quarter.<\/p>\n
GameStop in January unveiled a compensation package \u200bworth roughly $35 billion for Cohen, hinging on a turnaround \u200bthat requires him to lift the company’s \u200bmarket value to $100 billion and hit $10 billion in cumulative performance EBITDA (earnings before interest, \u200ctaxes, depreciation and amortization).<\/p>\n
The company’s shares have \u200bslumped from the all-time \u200bhighs hit in 2021, when it became a retail investor darling during the pandemic-era meme-stock rally.<\/p>\n
EBay, whose shares have risen over 19% this year, forecast second-quarter revenue above Wall Street \u200bestimates on Wednesday, betting on \u200clistings of collectibles and motor accessories as well as live-streamed auctions on its e-commerce \u200bplatform.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City, additional reporting by Echo Wang in New \u200bYork; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Sriraj Kalluvila)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 1 (Reuters) – GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14217,14216,8,13501,14219,9,14218,7,13311],"class_list":{"0":"post-23284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-ebay","9":"tag-gamestop","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-market-capitalization","12":"tag-market-value","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-ryan-cohen","15":"tag-top-stories","16":"tag-wall-street-journal"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116501796803430944","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}