The Good, The Bad and the Evil: eBay and Luxury Goods
Thursday, November 10, 2005 - Upcoming Event
Please RSVP: Attendance is limited to 60 people on a "first confirmed" basis.
In the event that your plans change, please be courteous and inform us.
The Good, The Bad and the Evil: eBay and Luxury Goods
Time:
8 - 9:30am
Location:
Mandarin Oriental, New York
Lotus Suite – 36th Floor, enter the hotel lobby at 60th Street, off Broadway
80 Columbus Circle at 60th Street
Speaker:
Dan Nissanoff
Vice Chairman and President
Portero Inc.
Generously Hosted by invitation of Mandarin Oriental, New York
Ebay has grown into a behemoth that generated almost $40 billion in sales last year. If it were a retailer, it would rank amongst the top 10 in the world. Over 150 million people trade on the site and almost 25% of all online revenue is transacted through it. eBay is quickly becoming a mainstream consumer venue.
But as eBay continues to grow, and new online exchanges emerge, it is beginning to have a subtle but serious impact on many sectors, including the luxury sector. The impact manifests itself in both positive and negative ways that are just becoming visible.
What is the relationship with eBay and the luxury market today? Where is it going in the future? How is it impacting your business and what can you do to harness its benefits and ward off its evils.
Internet Visionary and Net Marketplace Guru Dan Nissanoff shares his perspectives on what you need to know about eBay and other online marketplaces.
ABOUT DAN NISSANOFF
Daniel Nissanoff is an entrepreneur who is an internationally recognized and accomplished expert in secondary market economies, technologies and businesses. He is the Founder and Chairman of PartMiner Inc., the co-founder and President of Portero and the author of the forthcoming book FUTURESHOP: How the New Auction Culture Will Revolutionize the Way We Buy, Sell, and Get the Things We REALLY want (Penguin Press, January 2006).
In 1994, the same year eBay was founded and began to build its consumer-to-consumer marketplace, Nissanoff began focusing his professional energies on building a central online business-to-business marketplace for the electronic components industry. Since the world's leading technology manufacturers were not readily able to buy urgently needed parts for immediate delivery, or sell parts they no longer needed for fair value, he saw an opportunity to balance supply and demand in order to enable an improved level of fluidity; Nissanoff helped legitimize an entirely new way of doing business by re-writing the rules of trading in the secondary market.
By the late 1990's, he had brought his vision to reality and founded a company called Partminer. Working with a team of technologists from IBM's renown Watson Research Center, Partminer built one of the world's first business-to-business online marketplaces to service a $200 billion industry.
At the height of the Internet Boom, Partminer rolled out its "Free Trade Zone," a NASDAQ-like trading and information platform, which became the world's leading online marketplace for the semiconductor industry. By 2001, the FTZ was ranked by CMP as the most valuable component web site. Today, Partminer's digital solution is used exclusively by almost all of the top electronics manufacturers in the world.
Later, as the secondary market evolved and additional facilitation became necessary, Nissanoff built an "Excess Trade Zone" to allow large companies to consign goods and outsource the burden of channeling millions of dollars in components to the market in an orderly manner. This parallels the advent of the drop-off stores, which are beginning to provide the same service and create the same value for consumers.
To execute on his vision, Nissanoff raised more than $150 million from leading venture capital and strategic firms and partnered with some of the industry's biggest and most influential companies including Dell Corporation, Celestica and IBM. During his tenure as the founding Chairman and CEO of Partminer, Nissanoff grew the business to more than $100 million dollars in annual revenues and facilitated billions of dollars in transactions while employing more than 500 people globally. At its peak, Partminer's estimated market value was over $1 billion. Today, Partminer is headquartered in New York with offices world-wide.
While at Partminer, Nissanoff invented the first commercially deployed business shopping robot and also holds various patents for marketplace technologies and business processes for the secondary market.
Nissanoff has been there before, and sees remarkable similarities in how the evolution of the secondary market for consumer goods today is tracking the historic development (which he drove) of the secondary market in the electronic components industry which he drove. While eBay's upside potential is huge, it is intricately dependent on the arrival of facilitation services that will entice more buyers to become sellers, lubricate the market and therefore allow it to reach perfect liquidity.
In 2004, having spent most of his professional life on the b2b sector, Nissanoff decided to dedicate the next phase of his life to the consumer side of secondary markets. In addition to sharing his vision globally by writing this book, he has spent the last year building a leading eBay facilitation business, and founding a company specializing in secondary market research. Portero is a specialty eBay facilitator focused on the secondary market for luxury consumer brands and high quality consumer goods. Intelligent Insight is a leading market research firm that integrates secondary market data with primary market and general economic data to provide Fortune 500 companies with guidance on how they can better understand their markets.
Nissanoff was a 2001 finalist for the coveted Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He was named a "Mover and Shaker of 2001" by Electronic Industry, alongside 14 CEO's of multi-billion dollar public electronics companies. His deal with IBM was recognized by Line 56 as one of the 20 Top Events in 2000. Under his leadership, Partminer was ranked as a Deloitte Fast 500 company, for two years in a row. He is also an active member of Young President's Organization (YPO), an international assembly of over 11,000 influential business leaders, since 1999. He has been a frequent public speaker and featured guest at prominent events worldwide including Internet seminars, venture capital workshops, semiconductor industry events, and platform user conferences. Hundreds of articles have been written about him, his companies and his views and cutting-edge strategies on the Internet.
Prior to conceiving Partminer, Nissanoff founded a software company that automated secondary markets. Previously, he was also an associate attorney in the corporate reorganization group of the law firm of Weil, Gotshal and Manges.
Daniel Nissanoff holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.S. in Economics from California State University, Northridge. Dan has a passion for international travel and speaks many languages. He was born in L.A. and lives in Manhattan.