SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — EBay's fourth-quarter earnings beat Wall Street's expectations as bargain-hunting holiday shoppers flocked to its Internet shopping mall and digital payment service.
The results announced Wednesday served as the exclamation point on the best year yet for eBay Inc., an e-commerce pioneer founded in 1995.
EBay earned $757 million, or 57 cents per share, during the final three months of last year. That compared with net income of $2 billion, or $1.51 per share, in the same period last year.
The 2011 numbers were inflated by a windfall from eBay's $8.5 billion sale of online communications service Skype.
If not for certain items, eBay says it would have earned 70 cents a share. That figure was a penny above analysts' forecasts.
Revenue climbed 18 percent to nearly $4 billion.
