22 percent 1st-quarter profit rise for Ebay despite the uncertainty climate.   Ebay enjoyed an enviable niche in the market, an extremely profitable niche especially with its strategic purchase of Paypal.   It is well entrenched inside its niche with extremely strong community support.   Skype was quite a misfortune but I guess a one off lesson.

Never be too ambitious, but Ebay played its cards well after that lesson, further fine tuning and enhancing its niche markets.   Amazon is good on sales but low on profitability.  Ebay is an extremely profitable company.   I  guess it should capitalize on its vibrant communities to face off Facebook and the likes rather than go on a acquisition spree like that of Skype.   With its strong community, enhancing this is much easier than building a social network community from stretch and cost much less.   This should be the direction which Ebay should be heading.

It should not play to the market, let Google and MSN fight it out on the search engine arena while it entrenches itself in the auction and classifieds segment.   There are a lot of chances for Ebay to built on top of this lucrative segment and grow much faster.   I would say it is in a very good position and hope that it will defend that market position well.