Cohen is now proposing to take over a company roughly four times larger than the retail chain he operates. GameStop had a market value of $12 billion as of Friday. EBay was much larger at around $46 billion, though the game retailer has about $9 billion in cash.
Both companies have struggled to adapt to changing consumer preferences. GameStop has shut stores and emphasized collectible toys and trading cards as more video games are purchased online. EBay has been pushing collectibles and used goods on its own marketplace, creating a business overlap.
“EBay should be worth — and will be worth — a lot more money,” Cohen told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The CEO earlier told the paper he’s prepared for a proxy fight and will take the offer to shareholders if necessary.
“Though the companies overlap in collectibles and resale, we see low probability of a deal,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Poonam Goyal and Sydney Goodman said in a note on Friday. “Any credible offer would require substantial dilution and introduce meaningful execution risk.”
