Firma de e-commerce está buscando nuevas fuentes para impulsar su negocio
La compañía de comercio electrónico eBay y la casa de subastas Sotheby’s están trabajando en un acuerdo que permitirá llevar las pujas por obras de arte, antigüedades y objetos de colección de la prestigiosa firma al gran público en Internet.
Según el convenio, eBay pondrá en marcha una plataforma en línea a través de la que se retransmitirán en directo algunas de las subastas que se llevan a cabo en la sede central de Sotheby’s, en Nueva York, y en la que los internautas podrán pujar en tiempo real desde cualquier lugar del mundo.
EBay está buscando nuevas fuentes de crecimiento para impulsar su negocio, el que se ralentizó con un crecimiento de un 10% en el primer trimestre del año, frente al aumento de 12% del mismo período del año pasado.
En tanto, Sotheby‘s, con sede en Nueva York, ve una “oportunidad real” para expandirse en el mercado medio, con la venta de obras de arte a precios de entre US$ 50.000 a US$ 2 millones, dijo el presidente ejecutivo, William Ruprecht, en una rueda de prensa.
Hace unos días la empresa eBay lanzó su interface para América Latina. Según explicó su jefe de Márketing para la región, Fernando Trueba Gris, los usuarios accederán al catálogo en español y portugués y podrán ver los precios en su moneda local. “Donde estábamos presentes únicamente en inglés presentaba una barrera para los consumidores, estos no entraban a eBay, no se sentían cercanos a la plataforma, había una barrera invisible que no nos permitía dar ese primer paso”, dijo en una entrevista que brindó a El Comercio.
La empresa eBay lanzó sus páginas en español y portugués. ¿Cuál es el objetivo de esta nueva apuesta? Entendemos que estamos en un negocio de Internet y que Internet rompe barreras. Realmente, Internet une a los países y a la gente, lo que queremos hacer es entregar una experiencia que se sienta local en cada uno de los países. Donde estábamos presentes únicamente en inglés presentaba una barrera para los consumidores, estos no entraban a eBay, no se sentían cercanos a la plataforma, había una barrera invisible que no nos permitía dar ese primer paso.
Más allá del idioma, ¿hay otros cambios en la plataforma de eBay? Claro que sí, tenemos cambios funcionales. Por ejemplo, los motores de búsqueda son en español y portugués. Además, todo el inventario que se ve en América Latina está disponible y no te darás con la sorpresa de que tal producto no llega a tu país. También el tipo de cambio de moneda es a tiempo real.
¿Cuál será la estrategia de eBay para ingresar a la región? Queremos darles a los usuarios una experiencia local. Vamos a tener promociones específicas para cada país. Por ejemplo, si se viene un Cyber Monday o festividades, como el Día de la Madre o el Día del Padre, lanzaremos ofertas especiales. Vamos a estar presentes.
¿Logísticamente, América Latina está preparada para el ingreso de eBay? La situación es diferente en cada país de América Latina, hay países que están más preparados que otros porque tienen infraestructura para realizar las entregas. Como compañía no podemos hacer mucho para mejorar eso, pero si trabajamos muy de la mano con algunas empresas de reparto y con los correos nacionales. Aunque debo aclarar que nosotros no somos dueños de la distribución ni del inventario, sino que facilitamos el comercio.
¿Cómo vencerán algunos prejuicios que existen con las compras en línea? Para empezar, comprar en eBay es muy seguro. A través del PayPal (que permite la transferencia de dinero entre los usuarios y que guarda la confidencialidad de los datos financieros) es muy seguro comprar, es muy difícil de que ocurra un fraude. Siempre van a existir riesgo en Internet, hay situaciones que no se pueden controlar. Hay gente que tiene buenas intenciones y otras que no, pero confiamos en las regulaciones locales. Y si el peor de los casos ocurre una situación anómala, PayPal te devuelve tu dinero y se encarga de sancionar al vendedor.
¿Se buscará la compra y venta de productos nacionales? No existen muchos vendedores locales, hay algunos, pero todavía no promovemos eso en América Latina. Pero no es imposible pensar que ello vaya a suceder, porque América Latina es un mercado emergente.
FORTUNE -- It has not been a terrific year for eBay (EBAY), but more of a middling one. After years of restructuring the company and retooling its offerings, the e-commerce company seems to be hitting something of a soft patch that, while far from derailing its comeback, is taking a good amount of the wind out of it.
eBay's stock is up 2% so far in 2013. Not bad in itself but lagging the Nasdaq's 30% gain in the same period. eBay rival Amazon (AMZN) is also up 30%, while other big-name tech companies have rallied even higher: Google (GOOG) up 40%, Yahoo (YHOO) up 72%, and Facebook (FB) up 103%.
What's holding eBay back relative to its large-cap peers in the consumer web industry? Part of it is that the company outperformed those same peers in 2011, when it gained 68% as CEO John Donahoe's multi-year turnaround effort began to bear fruit and when eBay was one of the earliest tech companies to show it could make money on the mobile web.
As a result, eBay is much less the auction-oriented site that was an online consumer fad a decade ago and is now a much more staid but larger company building an e-commerce and payments platform supporting legions of small retailers as well as a growing number of large ones like Home Depot (HD) and Macy's (M).
eBay's revenue grew 27% in 2011 and 21% last year (to $14.1 billion), but Wall Street analysts expect that growth to slow some this year, to about 14%. That has put the stock's rally on pause as investors wait to see whether the turnaround can yield stronger growth in coming years.
When eBay reported its third-quarter earnings last week, investors were a little spooked by some comments by Donahoe and CFO Bob Swan. "The U.S. e-commerce softened considerably, and we have a cautious outlook for the holiday season," Swan said, explaining the company's guidance for 80 cents a share in fourth-quarter earnings, which was below Wall Street's consensus figure of 83 cents a share.
In the conference call to discuss earnings, Swan elaborated:
"The thing that's caused us the most angst is what we believe is a dramatically decelerating U.S. e-commerce growth rate from the second quarter of 15.5% to 16% for comScore to the third quarter of closer to 13% ... We haven't really seen any more positive signs in October than what we experienced through the latter part of the third quarter in the U.S."
Such comments set eBay's stock sinking until Donahoe, who himself referenced "a fairly lackluster macro environment" in the earnings call, said the next day that those comments were intended to be conservative and not as negative as they came across. ""I don't think we are seeing anything different than others are seeing; we just report first," Donahoe said in aninterview with AllThingsD.
That's not encouraging news for the fourth quarter -- by far the busiest for nearly all online retailers -- but it doesn't mean eBay's turnaround is in trouble. There are, however, other concerning signs -- especially in mobile commerce, a key area of the company's growth. While eBay acquired 36% of its new customers last quarter through mobile devices, they spent less because they are younger and with less disposable income or because they are living in emerging economies.
A bigger and more immediate concern in the rising competition in e-commerce: eBay and Amazon have long been rivals, but as their business models expand, they are beginning to encroach on each other's traditional turfs. This month, Amazon launched "Login and Pay," which lets Amazon's 215 million active customers use Amazon's technology to pay for purchases on other sites. Amazon earlier unveiled Checkout by Amazon for physical retail stores. Both of these new services will compete directly with eBay's areas of growth.
PayPal has faced down competitors like Google Wallet before and maintained its edge. Building an online payments product is such a long and complex process that first-mover advantage is substantial. Nor is eBay taking Amazon's moves sitting down. Its PayPal subsidiary announced this month a service offering free two-day shipping (just like Amazon Prime) for purchases made on retail sites such as Levi's, Kenneth Cole, and Sports Authority.
Even as eBay battles it out with Amazon, it's facing competition from a new wave of retailers likeGroupon Goods (GRPN), Etsy, Fab, Zulily, and many others. It may also face a formidable competitor in Alibaba if the Chinese e-commerce giant's planned IPO in U.S. markets presages a move into global commerce. And PayPal faces upstarts like Square, which this month announced a service letting anyone with a debit card send cash by email.
eBay recently responded to rising competition in online payments by paying $800 million for Braintree, an online payments processing company popular with mobile developers and growing startups like Airbnb and Uber. Donahoe has said the acquisition will strengthen PayPal's global presence in mobile commerce. And Monday, eBay bought London-based Shutl to help it offer same-day deliveries in as many as 25 cities by the end of next year.
Such moves are likely to keep eBay growing in a competitive market. More worrisome is that competition is intensifying in e-commerce just as economic uncertainty is slowing the pace of e-commerce growth. Even if it continues to make shrewd moves, eBay investors may find the turnaround it took years to put into place may not be producing the rich crop of fruits they once anticipated.
Picture this anxiety-provoking scenario: you’re at an all-day conference, sweating bullets as you prep for a presentation in an hour’s time. But you packed in haste and left your laptop charger at home. Your battery capacity is perilously close to zero. You don’t have time to dash to Best BuyBBY-0.57% and you wouldn’t dare ask a fellow presenter for a favor lest you show your hand.
eBay knows its customers (including you, the disheveled executive) and has been quietly working on a solution for this thoroughly modern conundrum.
The eBay Now app allows you to instantly order that laptop charger and have it in your clammy palms within the hour, courtesy of eBay’s partnerships with 14 big-name retailers including Best Buy, TargetTGT+0.9%and Macy'sM+1.43%.
An eBay “valet” will find whatever you need at a store nearest you and deliver it, much like a same-day courier but for a far more reasonable price (a flat $5 delivery charge).
If you live in New York, San Francisco or San Jose you can already download eBay Now. If you happen to be in Chicago or Dallas, you’re next; the service will roll out across U.S. cities this summer.
I recently tried out this technology on an iPhone 5 (the app works on all iOS and Android devices, as well as the mobile Web). I tested the app with a $30 cell phone charger — the one item I always find myself without when I’m stuck somewhere, in a time crunch. I chose from a selection eBay Now found for me at stores in my area of downtown Manhattan and paid for it instantly through eBay’s secure PayPal mobile payment system.
An eBay Now valet, decked out in the company’s colorful insignia, arrived in about 30 minutes by bicycle. She’d grabbed the charger at Best Buy and zipped through the downtown traffic. For now, all of these valets are employed by eBay, but as the program extends to new cities, eBay may well hire couriers from outside contractors. “We’re testing and learning,” said Dave Ramadge, director of eBay Now. “This is a pilot.”
If eBay Now catches on, it could be a coup for the site, which has been increasingly making moves to cement its status in the brick and mortar world. In April, eBay subsidiary PayPal announced that its cloud-based payment system is up and running in 250,000 stores across the country, from big-name chains like Home DepotHD-0.19%, American Eagle and Foot LockerFL-0.62% to smaller family-run businesses.
The aim is for shoppers to be able to use PayPal at the cash register in two million stores by the end of 2013. In many of these transactions, all a customer will need to do to make a purchase is type in his or her cell phone number and PIN.
If PayPal’s evolution seems aimed at digital payment competitor GoogleGOOG-0.4% Wallet, there’s no doubt eBay Now poses a greater threat to Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Both retail giants have recently made high-profile advances in the race towards same-day delivery, the holy grail of online commerce.
As eBay Now rolls out across the country, the company already has its next delivery milestone in mind. “We’ll have scheduled delivery,” said Ramadge. “You can decide if you want your charger in an hour or, if you’ll be in a meeting, in two hours.”
10 Big States Taxing Internet Sales
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10 Big States Taxing Internet Sales
Shopped online recently? Don’t be surprised if your state’s sales tax is added to the total at check-out. Congress has yet to pass a bill requiring an Internet-only merchant in one state to charge sales taxes to customers in another, but revenue hungry states have pushed ahead---using new laws, reinvigorated old ones and audits to pressure sellers to collect their levies. Traditional retailers like Wal-Mart fell in line years ago, as did Apple and Dell. And by Jan. 1, 2014, the biggest hold-out-- Internet behemoth Amazon.com—will be collecting sales taxes from more than half the U.S. population. Still fancy tax-free? Try eBay or Overstock.com. Or move to Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, Montana or Oregon, which have no sales taxes. Here, as of April 2013, are the 10 biggest population states that have moved to tax e-commerce.
Same-day delivery by online retailers is quickly becoming the new
front line of retail competition. eBay’s test of its eBay Now program in
San Francisco and New York
is raising a few eyebrows, causing people to wonder why in the world do
we need products so quickly. But is it the right question to ask?
eBay’s new endeavor employs couriers to be on call, 24/7. When a
local resident places an order, the courier procures the item from a
local retailer and delivers it within an hour. There’s a nominal fee —
$5 — and eBay is offering financial incentives such as $15 off the first
order to try the service.
eBay isn’t alone in offering same-day delivery. Amazon has a service
in nearly a dozen markets and analysts predict that number will grow in
2013. Walmart, too, has same-day service in some markets and Google is testing same-day delivery in San Francisco, according to the Wall Street Journal.
After the WSJ story ran, an ABC news producer phoned asking
for input for their own story (it never ran, bumped by the pregnant
princess). Using the example of a shopper needing a cake pan one evening
and the eBay Now courier fetching said pan from a Macy’s
store, delivering it inside an hour. She asked, why? Why do we need
these things so fast, without exerting any personal physical effort?
It’s a sentiment echoed in the comments section of nearly every story
written on this subject. Are we spoiled and lazy? Does this spell the
end of civilization, along with fast food and Facebook? Hardly. The question isn’t do we need this, it’s why are we being offered it.
Competition. Retailers compete with each other, every minute of every
day. Offering a new service or product, doing something first or
better, selling product for less are all ways to compete. Same-day
delivery is no different.
Do we need it? Not really, but anyone who’s ever used the service can
attest to how useful it can be. A commuter on her way home suddenly
remembers a bake sale commitment for the next day. She uses her
smartphone to order supplies, which arrive at her home shortly after she
does. Eliminating a process that would add hours to her evening.
Instead of making a special trip to the store (possibly requiring
childcare) and staying up late baking, she uses an app to keep a long
day from being even longer.
Mobile shopping and proliferation of smartphones are making same-day
delivery more viable. A built out distribution network of merchants and
stores make the short delivery window possible, and the need for online
retailers to expand into new markets and product categories are driving
the trend. If eBay and Amazon can deliver products within a day, it puts
them in more direct competition with drugstores, supermarkets and home
improvement retailers. All of which better watch out, Amazon is coming.
Yes, it’s costly and entirely possible that retailers will lose money
on the efforts, at least at the outset. But retailers run loss leaders
all the time to drive traffic and instill customer loyalty. It’s about
competition and beating the other guy. Losing some money on a service is
a cost of doing business.
Do we need same-day delivery? Not really, but it’s coming, like it or not.
Funny thing about so-called free market advocates who find themselves as guests on a lot of cable TV financial shows. They talk the talk, but then you find out that they don’t always walk the walk.
Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m an unrepentant capitalist myself with very firm libertarian leanings, which means I favor limited government intrusion into our boardrooms and bedrooms. On the other hand, I also appreciate the need for reasonable regulation and the fair administration of justice. Finding a way to balance all of those sometimes competing beliefs presents quite a challenge.
Which brings me back to all those big shots who mouth off about free markets, capitalism, American entrepreneurial spirit, and, the like. Funny, isn’t it, how so many of those folks turn out to be hypocrites. The first chance they get to rig a deal or the system, why all their high fallutin’ free market passion evaporates.
Consider the following circumstances:
Beginning no later than 2006, Apple and Google executives:
Beginning no later than May 2005, senior Apple and Adobe executives:
Beginning no later than April 2007, Apple and Pixar executives:
agreed not to cold call each other’s employees. Generally, the off-setting company to the agreement was placed on the other company’s internal “Do Not Call” list, which instructed employees not to directly solicit employees from the covered firm.
Cold Call Freeze
On September 24, 2012, Adobe Systems Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp., Intuit Inc. and Pixar settled with the Department of Justice concerning allegations in a civil antitrust Complaint that they had entered into non-solicitation agreements involving their highly-skilled employees. Rather than merely understandings formulated and enforced at the lower echelons of the cited organizations, the Complaint alleged that the agreements were formed and actively managed by senior executives. Apparently the C-Suites saw eye to eye.
In the high technology sector, there is a strong demand for employees with advanced or specialized skills, and among the principal means by which high tech companies recruit such candidates is to solicit them directly from other companies via “cold calling.” By restricting cold calling and putting in place what basically amounted to a ceasefire against poaching, the cited companies allegedly engaged in anticompetitive non-solicitation agreements. Although the Complaint alleged only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the settlement more broadly prohibited the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.
For More Details, see these source materials inUnited States v. Adobe Systems, Inc., Apple Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corporation, Intuit, Inc., and Pixar
Oops . . . the Antitrust Division seems to have missed one. On November 16, 2012, the Department of Justice / Antitrust Division filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in the Northern District of California against eBay Inc., alleging that beginning no later than 2006 and lasting at least until 2009, eBay and Intuit entered an illegal agreement that restricted their ability to actively recruit certain employees from the other company, and for some period of time even restricted at least eBay from hiring any employees at Intuit. Seems that the two company were frequently in direct competition over retaining the services of computer engineers, scientist, and other specialized employees covered by the non-competition agreements. In 2007, eBay agreed that it would not recruit Intuit’s employees. eBay’s recruiting personnel were instructed to not pursue potential applications that came from Intuit and to throw away such resumes.
You remember Intuit, don’t you? It was among the six firms cited in the 2010 Complaint. Looks like poor old eBay got snared into the cold-call cold war and agreed to the same brokered deal about no poaching. The 2012 antitrust lawsuit asserts that the Intuit / eBay agreement eliminated competition to the detriment of affected employees, who were likely deprived of access to better job opportunities and salaries. Notably, Meg Whitman, then eBay’s CEO, and Scott Cook, Intuit’s founder and executive committee chair, are alleged to have been intimately involved in forming, monitoring and enforcing the agreement. Again, the C-Suites seem to have seen eye to eye.
The antitrust lawsuit seeks to prevent eBay from adhering to or enforcing the agreement and from entering into any similar agreements with any other companies. Intuit, of course, was already subject to the 2010 settlement noted above and it was not deemed necessary to name that firm in the new complaint. The theory is that the relief the obtained in the previous settlement with Intuit is sufficient to prevent the firm from entering into these types of agreements. The investigation by the Antitrust Division of the eBay / Intuit non-competition agreement arose from the division’s December 2010 lawsuit against Lucasfilm for entering into a similar agreement with Pixar.
Bill Singer’s Comment
You may enjoy a stroll down memory lane to May 25, 2010 when then California Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman appeared on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report” and, among other things, complains that California is”losing too many jobs overseas and to other states.” Whitman promises an innovative “plan to create two million private sector jobs by 2015.” (about 2 minutes into the tape)
Pierre Omidyar looked out over Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley this past February, scanning the horizon with his camera in hand. All the billionaire eBay founder could see for miles were huge, belching chimneys taller than houses and mountains of red bricks drying in the winter sun. Kids of 12 or 13 lugged bricks on their backs to and from these ovens, 80 pounds at a time. Ninety percent of the workers here in Bhaktapur, the heart of Nepal’s brick sector, are slaves. Day after day they incur more debt to the traffickers who found them these jobs and hovels to live in nearby.
As Omidyar walked around snapping photos, he grew more certain that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture. “They don’t let people like us visit the bad kilns,” he says. “I extrapolated. If this is one of the good ones, what does a bad one look like?”
It’s a question he’s trying to make permanently moot. Omidyar and his wife, Pam, are taking their considerable fortune and business acumen and deploying them in an ambitious effort to end modern-day slavery. Nepal, they’ve decided, will be their case study; success would have global ramifications.
This means creating Omidyar-funded options so that Bhaktapur’s children won’t feel compelled to sign the human traffickers’ bogus, exploitative contracts. First up: a $600,000 grant that will pay for 2,500 working kids to leave the dangerous, dirty Nepalese kilns and go to school. Next the Omidyars plan to pay for entrepreneurship and money management training to help 4,000 more brick workers escape slavery.
In the past four years the Omidyars have become the single biggest private donors to the fight against the pernicious but lucrative human trafficking industry. They’ve invested $115 million to date in their Humanity United foundation, which funds 85 antislavery nonprofits as well as on-the-ground projects in five countries, including this first one in Nepal. They’ve pledged to spend another $50 million by 2016.
They’re up against increasingly sophisticated sex and labor trafficking rings, many backed by organized crime, in a business that generates $32 billion in worldwide revenues a year, according to the UN. But the Omidyars have recruited powerful partners that stand the best chance to date to win the battle.
When eBay went public in 1998, Pierre Omidyar “skipped ‘regular rich’ and went straight to ‘ridiculous rich,’ ” he says. He and Pam, a molecular scientist and his college sweetheart from Tufts, decided immediately that they’d give the vast majority of their wealth away within their lifetimes (they’ve since signed the Giving Pledge). Both just 31 then and worth more than $7 billion, it was a serious, overwhelming proposition. It took a few early years of earnest, scattershot check-writing across a handful of charities before they focused on trafficking as a target.
Humanity United was Pam’s idea. While Pierre expanded his auction site into a multibillion-dollar public company, she spent her days holed up in a UC Santa Cruz biology lab doing pharmaceutical research for her master’s degree, rarely surfacing to read the news. “I insulated myself against world events,” she says. During a stay in Pierre’s birth city of Paris in the early 2000s, she had time to flip through a National Geographic and landed on a piece about Darfur, at the time descending into civil war. She was horrified at the stories of Sudanese child soldiers and trafficked refugees. She did some digging but couldn’t find much coverage of modern-day slavery in the press or any evidence of attention from rich philanthropists.
Pam and Pierre Omidyar (Photo: Michele Clement)
Pam decided the couple’s donations to charities like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, however generous, were no longer cutting it. Pierre was immediately on board. Sudan would join Nepal on the list of countries they eventually chose to focus their cash on first, along with Congo, Liberia and the U.S., where more than 40,000 women, men and kids are being held as sex slaves, unpaid domestic workers or forced field hands at any given time.
The Omidyars decided they wouldn’t start from scratch unless they absolutely had to. In the U.S. they found a smattering of disparate antislavery NGOs, most of them small and working in isolation. In Florida evangelicals from the faith-based International Justice Mission were trying to free Mexican tomato pickers from forced labor with a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. In California social workers from the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking were working to free women trapped in domestic servitude in Los Angeles, as well as monitoring a growing problem of unpaid farm laborers upstate. Both groups were lobbying for the same antitrafficking legislation with little funding and no cooperation.
Pierre, Pam and their team at Humanity United found the best of these U.S. antislavery nonprofits, grouped them under one umbrella–the Alliance to End Slavery & Trafficking–and invested $8 million across all 12 of them. They didn’t meddle much, trusting that the new group would know best how to make a joint case to Congress to pass a raft of laws.
It’s the same tenet Pierre remembers invoking as a twentysomething computer programmer: Give someone the right tools and the benefit of the doubt, and they’ll rarely screw you. (It was, he recalls, rather tougher to convince the jaded tech press that his new auction platform wouldn’t be overrun with cheaters and counterfeiters.) “In the early days of eBay I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good,” he says. “Ebay’s success as a company depends on the success of the community of sellers.”
The Omidyars’ $165 million pledge to Humanity United is just part of the $1.25 billion they’ve given away to date to philanthropic causes–both nonprofit grants and for-profit investments, mostly in companies that would be considered early stage by Silicon Valley standards. The Omidyar Network’s for-profit portfolio spreads $100 million across 28 microfinance operations as well as smaller injections of capital into startups in developing countries: a mobile payment firm in Zambia and a solar lighting venture on the Indian subcontinent, for example. “For some reason people think that doing good is giving money away and business is just business,” says Matt Bannick, who runs the Omidyar Network. “It’s an artificial bifurcation. Businesses can have a social impact. People are earning their livelihoods on eBay.”
So far the slavery alliance hasn’t let the Omidyars down. A year after Humanity United’s grant kicked in, the combined advocacy efforts of these ex-slaves, social workers, lawyers and churches secured 90% of the amendments they’d requested to the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which helps rescued slaves secure visas and protect themselves from retribution from their traffickers. In 2010 the group lobbied for, and won, a landmark $12 million increase in U.S. federal antitrafficking funds.
To antislavery experts, having the Omidyars’ names attached to the cause has helped legitimize it. “These small NGOs are now part of a whole,” says Kevin Bales, who in 1999 published Disposable People , considered a seminal work on modern slavery (and the first book Pam looked for after reading National Geographic ). “They’re not just going cap in hand to senators. If you want a politician to show up for anything, put a billionaire’s name on it.”
The Omidyars’ investment in the alliance also pays for ex-slaves to train as advocates, meeting regularly with politicians to put a clearer face on the misunderstood business of trafficking. FORBES met a member of this national Survivors’ Caucus, Ima Matul, in a former convent near Los Angeles’ grubby Koreatown. It’s been converted into a comfortable shelter run by the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking, one of the 12 U.S. antitrafficking groups funded by the Omidyars. She’s one of 550 slaves from 58 countries the Coalition has helped rescue.
Indonesian, petite and dressed in corporate casual, Matul perches on a leather sofa in the home’s large living room. Along one wall is a row of desktop computers where Ethiopian residents often watch soaps from their home country on YouTube. In a sunny back garden vines half-obscure a stone grotto containing a shrine to the Virgin Mary, a relic from the home’s convent days. The shelter is ten minutes from West Hollywood, where Matul spent three years as a teenaged domestic slave.
She’d already escaped an abusive arranged marriage at age 16 by the time she arrived in L.A. from the East Javanese city of Malang. Her traffickers, an Indonesian couple expecting baby number two, reeled off a list of expectations as soon as she arrived in their handsome home. She’d be a cook, cleaner, housekeeper, nanny, and gardener, all for a promised salary of $150 a month, which never materialized. She was beaten daily. If the wife found a patch of rogue dirt or dust in the house, she’d smear it across Matul’s face. Unable to speak English, she felt trapped and was repeatedly warned she’d be jailed if she tried to escape, a common tactic traffickers use to control young, naive victims.
When Matul was finally able to run away with the help of a nanny working next door, CAST gave her shelter, helped her train for a job in a law firm and then hired her to teach fellow survivors to lobby legislators. Last year Matul testified before Congress as part of a push to see the Trafficking Victims Protection Act reauthorized. Right now it remains stalled in the House; it’ll be up for discussion in the first session following the presidential election. Among other measures it would make it easier for courts to prosecute traffickers. Matul knows firsthand how important the bill is because the woman who held her captive never spent a day in jail.
Humanity United’s latest milestone has been rather more public than the passage of biennial bills or the funding of Nepalese schools. In a speech at September’s annual Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, President Obama announced a partnership between Humanity United and the White House, backed by $6 million from sponsors including Goldman Sachs in its first big donation to anything slavery-related. “We’re going after the traffickers,” said Obama to a mixture of applause and stunned faces.
The President reeled off new initiatives, all of which will serve to boost Humanity United’s work at the federal level. There’ll be training to help police, Amtrak ticket-takers, teachers and others likely to encounter slaves to better identify them as victims rather than prostitutes or runaways. Tech and Internet companies will be offered incentives to help make the Web safer rather than a tool for traffickers to recruit or sell their wares. There’ll be simpler visa procedures for victims, he said. And, crucially, his administration would be helping take forced labor out of the business supply chain, starting with U.S. government contractors.
“The idea that there are exploitative labor practices that pollute the supply chain, more people are aware of now,” says Pierre, noting also the recent flurry of media attention on Chinese iPhone manufacturer Foxconn. “They are starting to think about, do I want to have a piece of equipment that’s made by people in these horrible working conditions? Sweatshops, basically.”
He had to miss Obama’s announcement, which coincided with an eBay board meeting (it still pays the bills, after all). Pam, however, was in the audience blinking back tears. “It was the longest speech on the topic of slavery since Lincoln was in office,” she says. Not far from Pam sat Ima Matul. Before the address the President had sought out the Humanity United delegation and greeted Matul in her native tongue, the Indonesian language Bahasa. Toward the end of his speech President Obama asked that she stand and be recognized for her work.
Pierre has taken a leadership role among Giving Pledge members and fellow billionaires , teaching how to use entrepreneurial skills to tackle the world’s problems. Former eBay colleague Jeff Skoll and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have both backed antislavery initiatives through their respective foundations after consulting with Humanity United.
Overseas, Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest has been working toward eradicating trafficking in his own hemisphere. He was moved to found the Perth-based nonprofit Walk Free after a close encounter with slavery. His teenage daughter had been volunteering at an orphanage when it emerged the youngsters weren’t being cared for but rather groomed for sex work.
“‘Value add’ is a horrific term when applied to children,” says Forrest, Australia’s third-richest person. “We had a catatonic reaction to it.” He talks regularly with Humanity United executives to ensure the two groups are working in tandem as much as possible. Like Pierre, Forrest is now a full-time philanthropist; he stepped down as CEO of his Fortescue Metals Group to focus on giving his money away. He also shares the Omidyars’ hope that other NGOs, governments and wealthy individuals will start devoting attention and much-needed funds on ridding slavery from the business supply chain, where it remains prevalent. Big-box store chains are especially susceptible to relying on cheap or forced labor in developing countries, often unaware. “It’s the dark side of globalization,” Forrest says.
For Pierre’s part, he’s encouraged by his February visit to Nepal. He stood in the hallway of a brick kiln school funded by Humanity United money, observing from a distance and taking the occasional photo for his amateur portfolio. Pam sat on the floor of the classroom, joining in the lesson. “I would’ve expected, oh, these are terrible victims, and they’re being beaten every day so they’re kind of downcast, like you might see in the movies, walking around with hunched shoulders,” Pierre says. “They’re regular little kids, and the ones who are in school are raising their hands.”
Inside eBay Billionaire Pierre Omidyar's Battle To End Human Trafficking
Michelle Clement
Pierre Omidyar
The eBay billionaire and his wife Pam are the biggest single donors to the fight against trafficking.
