eBay is one of the net's four horsemen, the others being Yahoo, Amazon and Google. Though there are opinions that ebay has a less attractive environment for sellers and buyers, the company’s earnings say a different story. Ebay's earnings have drawn attention to Internet Tech Sector.

Total sales of goods at eBay.com in 2007 reached $59.35 billion, showing 13.1% increase from last year. The gross merchandise volume or GMV of ebay’s fourth quarter sales was $16.21 billion, an increase of 12% from the previous year. The number of new listings increased to 637.2 million from 610 million in 2007.

Though eBay's revenue for the year increased from $5.97 billion to $7.67 billion, the net income of $348 million saw a 69% drop from $1.12 billion in 2006.

In the last quarter, the revenue was $2.18 billion, a rise of 27% from $1.72 billion year ago while net income showed a 53% growth. It increased to $531 million from $346 million.

Non-auctions represented 42% of all sales, up from 38% a year earlier. eBay had 83.2 million active users at the end of the fourth quarter. The number of stores hosted on eBay decreased to 532,000 stores from 593,000 a year earlier, a 10% drop.

EBay has 3 business units. First is the Marketplace, where goods trading takes place.70% of eBay's revenue still comes from the core marketplace business. These include comparison shopping engine Shopping.com and other e-commerce sites such as event ticket provider StubHub as well as eBay.com. Marketplaces recorded 18% growth in revenue mainly due to StubHub, advertising, the fixed price format on eBay and also by the benefit of a weaker U.S. dollar, with 54% of Marketplaces revenue for the quarter coming from outside U.S.

The second unit is Communications, which includes Internet telephone service Skype where eBay invested $4 billion. In the fourth quarter, Skype contributed $115 million in revenue, a 79% year-over-year gain while the total revenue was $377 million. Skype had more than 276 million registered users worldwide at the end of the quarter.

Payments are the last unit which includes PayPal where eBAY had put in $1.5 billion. PayPal seems to be the most bullet-proof part of the business that continues to maintain or gain market share in online payments. The Payments operation’s revenue reached $539 million for the quarter, an increase of 34% over the previous year. For the year, it reached $1.83 billion.Net total payment volume at $14 billion, showed a 35% gain over last year’s fourth quarter. Revenue growth and net total payment growth represent increased penetration of PayPal on eBay as well as other web locations.

Says Jeff Jordan, the eBay executive in charge of the PayPal subsidiary, "In our wild aspirations, we think PayPal has the potential to be as big, if not bigger than, eBay."