International Business - Multinational Enterprises - Cross Boundary Research Paper

International Business - Multinational Enterprises - Cross Boundary Expansions - Research Paper Example (So & Westward, 2009) By 2007, â€Å"Taobao held 82 percent of the market, according to Analysys International† and eBay sold out of the EachNet venture, maintaining only its www.ebay.cn operations, which were not adopted in a widespread manner for domestic Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) ecommerce transaction in China. (So & Westward, 2009) eBay can also be seen to have failed in the advancement of it PayPal strategy in China, which was surpassed by AliPay in usage by Chinese consumers. What is most striking in these examples is that eBay had the competitive advantages of pre-existing market dominance, brand name recognition, partnership with the dominant ecommerce auction website in China, and still failed in not only maintaining these market positions, but instead became a minority business operator in the Chinese domestic marketplace for online auctions. ... eBay’s failure to respect the local dynamics of Chinese culture and its patterns of internet use, its centralized corporate strategy internationally, as well as its failure to understand the threat of TaoBao to its business model in China all led to the eBay’s cross-boundary expansion strategy internationally being unsuccessful in accomplishing its aims of foreign market establishment, increased company profit, and the creation of long-term shareholder value. eBay – Company History eBay is widely regarded as one of the leading success stories of the Web 1.0 era, or the â€Å"dot-com boom† period in the late 1990’s that saw many internet companies go public with very high amounts of stock market speculation. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and Meg Whitman joined the company in 1998 with prior experience at Hasbro and Harvard Business School. (Gomes-Casseres, 2001) eBay outmaneuvered other web companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Amazon .com to earn significant revenue from ecommerce sales based on the auction and C2C model. eBay requires listing charges for people to advertise their goods for sale on the site, charges an additional percentage of the sale as a commission, and also receives a service charge from credit card transactions via its PayPal services. The company is the leader in the U.S. online auction market, and went public in 1998. As news sources reported, the company’s stock soared at the time of the IPO, â€Å"shares of eBay went up 163.2 percent† on the first day of trading to close at $47.375 with a market capitalization of $1.9 billion USD. (Kawamoto and Grice, 1998) Today, eBay trades on the NADAQ exchange under the symbol EBAY with a stock