PayPal spun off from eBay

Activist investor Carl Icahn has got his wish after nine months of campaigning for the demerger.

Online auction site eBay and its digital payments business PayPal are to split. PayPal will be separately listed on the stockmarket. The demerger, which the board of eBay had hitherto resisted, despite heavy pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, will be completed next year.

PayPal has boomed in the 12 years it has been part of eBay. Revenues are expanding by 20% a year, a growth rate twice as fast as the e-commerce platform's own and eBay's shares rose by almost 8% on the news.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.