Bonus Exclusive | eBay China launches large-scale personnel adjustment, and the relevant proportion may reach 80%

Exclusive from Workplace Bonus, eBay China launched a new round of personnel adjustments this week, involving major office locations including Shanghai. Multiple independent sources revealed that the layoff ratio in the China region may have reached 80%, and "many eBay employees have started to actively look for opportunities on social recruitment platforms".

SignalHire estimates that the size of eBay China R&D center ranges from 500 to 1000 people. Industrial and commercial social security data shows that its technical entity eBay Software Development (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had 611 participants in 2025; eBay Network Information Services (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had 118 participants; eBay Management (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. had 189 employees in 2024.

On October 21, eBay announced through an internal memo that it would cut about 9% of its global workforce, involving about 1000 to 1100 positions. Only eight months after it laid off about 800 people (accounting for 6%) in February, the two rounds of layoffs in 2026 have accounted for about 15% of the total number of employees.

Looking at the global situation, eBay has been streamlining its personnel for three consecutive years: it laid off about 500 people in February 2023; about 1000 people in January 2024; another about 800 people in February 2026 (with about 12,300 global employees at that time); in June 2026, its US team cut another 639 people and closed its San Francisco office.

The resources released by the layoffs are being directed to artificial intelligence and Depop, the second-hand fashion platform acquired for 1.2 billion US dollars. The latter targets Generation Z, which is eBay's move to bet on "circular e-commerce".

The Glorious Past of eBay China

For many practitioners who entered the e-commerce technology field around 2017, eBay China used to be a name with the "foreign enterprise aura".

eBay Inc. was founded in September 1995 in San Jose, California, the United States, and its founder is Pierre Omidyar, a French-American. The company is currently listed on NASDAQ, and its headquarters is still in San Jose. In 1999, Shao Yibo and Tan Haiyin founded EachNet in Shanghai. In June 2003, eBay acquired EachNet as a wholly-owned subsidiary for about 150 million US dollars. EachNet was later renamed "eBay EachNet", and Shao Yibo once served as eBay's global vice president.

eBay China R&D Center (CCOE), established in 2004, is eBay's first overseas R&D center. In 2012, Tian Wei took over the team with about 500 people, which expanded to nearly 800 people five years later, and close to 1000 people around 2019. The team incubated open source projects such as Apache Kylin, which is the first top-level open source project contributed entirely by the eBay Shanghai team to the Apache Software Foundation. Its head Tian Wei was promoted to eBay Global Vice President in 2017 and won the Annual President's Award.

In the Chinese e-commerce technology talent market around 2017, eBay China provided a large number of positions, and employees enjoyed the salary and work rhythm of the foreign enterprise system at the same time. Meanwhile, the talent pool of eBay China has also become one of the sources of talent demand for the development of China's e-commerce industry.

In Q2 2026, eBay's GMV reached 22.4 billion US dollars, with revenue of 3.13 billion US dollars, and non-GAAP earnings per share was 1.60 US dollars, all exceeding market expectations. Among them, the GMV of the US region increased by 24% year-on-year, and its stock price has risen by nearly 40% cumulatively within the year.

eBay's announced plans include three points: first, complete and deeply integrate the second-hand fashion platform Depop (acquired for 1.2 billion US dollars) which was delivered in Q2, and use its Generation Z user group to expand C2C circular e-commerce. The management expects that Depop will drag down the profit margin by about 2 percentage points in the short term, and will start to increase profits from 2028; second, invest the resources released by layoffs in artificial intelligence and the fastest-growing core business, focus on key categories such as collectibles and fashion, as well as live streaming shopping formats such as eBay Live; third, continue aggressive shareholder return, with about 2 billion US dollars of share repurchases throughout the year plus a quarterly dividend of 0.31 US dollars, planning to return 90%–100% of normalized free cash flow.

Some views hold that eBay's move of "still making large-scale layoffs despite good performance" aims to lock in cost elasticity in the window period when the stock competition in the e-commerce industry is intensifying and AI is reshaping the industry pattern. For the Chinese market, the significant downsizing of the Shanghai R&D center, which once incubated Apache Kylin and had a scale of nearly 1000 people at its peak, also means the end of an era — eBay's future role in China may retreat from an R&D center to a "business foothold".

Written by | JIANG Yutian

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This article is from WeChat Official Account "Workplace Bonus", author: Workplace Dividend Research Institute, published with authorization from 36Kr.