Goldman live blogging III

Q: Can you talk about China?
A: It was a big learning experience for us - we acquired Eachnet and then replatformed and that was not good.  We have partnered, they have built new platform (based on Korea), they've launched it and we'll continue to have same JV approach in China, Taiwan and in other small Asian countries like Thailand we will look at JVs.

(Swan) The best way to win long-term is to partner.  We retained the rights to the CBT.  That leverages our unique capabilities.  That is a second way we benefit from China.  Third we have a Chinese and Indian development centers where more and more of our product development is done.

(JD) We have made substantial growth in Chinese selling into other regions.

Q: Do you view your status in Latin America as strong?
A: Mercado Libre is our partner there. (points to CEO).  Very similar to our Chinese strategy, we are happy being a 20% owner and keeping a strong local team in place there.

Q: Paypal off-eBay, what are you doing?
A: The product sells itself.  We go to merchants and offer an online product, pay us lower fees and drive incremental sales.  We have documents from large merchants to small that proves this out (1-5% and sometimes more).  So merchants off-ebay are aggressively adopting PayPal as another payment system.  We bring 140m users to the sites.  We drive lower rates thanks to the mix.

(Swan) Scale really works in this business.  Sales team approaches by vertical.  If we can get the top player in a vertical we can add more.  For example we added SouthWest and now we have 6-7 airlines.

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