The American chain GameStop wants to acquire eBay for $56 billion to eventually compete with Amazon. This was reported by Bild, according to UNN.
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Video game retailer GameStop has announced its intention to acquire eBay. The offer is striking — $56 billion. GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen plans to turn the merged company into Amazon's most serious competitor, he stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He already possesses part of the capital required for the takeover.
The publication notes that, at first glance, such a mega-deal looks extremely unusual. After all, eBay is significantly more well-known globally and approximately three times larger than GameStop. Furthermore, both companies face similar challenges: as pioneers in their respective fields, they have come under pressure from competitors, and their revenues have been trending downward.
At the same time, the deal aligns with Cohen's ambitions. In 2020, he became an investor in the company and sharply criticized the management for a strategy that was too slow and insufficiently technological. Three years later, he took over as CEO and radically restructured the business. Instead of thousands of stores, the focus is now on online sales of collectible cards and retro consoles intended to evoke emotional responses from customers.
The publication adds that it is not yet known whether GameStop can afford such a deal at all. Cohen stated that he has already secured $20 billion — roughly a third of the required amount. It is known that he plans to pay for the deal partly in cash and partly in stock. The scale of this attempt to challenge Amazon is evident: Jeff Bezos's company (with revenues of $717 billion) is approximately 50 times larger than eBay and GameStop combined.
GameStop has long caused a stir on the stock market. When the company was experiencing a crisis in 2021, video game fans coordinated online and collectively "pumped" the stock price. The stock exchange reacted positively to the takeover plan: shares of both companies rose.
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