Industry News

StubHub president Scott Cutler to depart

StubHub is searching for a new leader after it was announced president Scott Cutler has taken up a new role within parent company eBay.

Cutler has been promoted to senior vice-president, Americas, for eBay’s marketplace business. The company said in a statement he will continue to serve as head of StubHub while it searches for a new head.

Cutler replaced Chris Tsakalakis as president of StubHub in April 2015 after nine years as an executive vice-president at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Having started his career as a corporate securities lawyer, he also worked in investment banking focused on the software and internet industries.

The eBay statement read: “Scott Cutler is a seasoned executive with extensive global business experience and a belief in the transformative power of technology. His extensive leadership experience combined with the strong management team that he will lead positions us well to execute our strategic plans.”

Cutler made an instant impact after taking over at StubHub in 2015. Within six months he had boosted ticket sales by 33 per cent, from 0.9 tickets a second to 1.2 a second. He also oversaw the final stages of a ‘replatforming’ that created a unified ‘code base’ for StubHub’s apps and websites and allowed it to deploy updates daily rather than monthly.

During his tenure, Scott Cutler also oversaw the $165m purchase of international ticketing operator Ticketbis in 2016.

StubHub posted record financial results for the final quarter of 2016, with gross merchandise value (GMV) of $1.2bn (£950m/€1.1bn) during the three months to December 31.

However, in its most recent trading update, StubHub announced a five-per-cent year-on-year drop in sales despite a strong international performance.

In a Q2 2017 trading update published by eBay, the ticket operator’s gross merchandise value (GMV) fell from $1.06bn (£815m/€910m) to $1.01bn. However, the figure was up 10 per cent on the first quarter of the year.