Last September, eBay announced plans to spin off PayPal after activist investor Carl Icahn called for such a move. While the decision allows each company to focus on their respective business, as detailed in our story on eBay, eBay will still need to find a growth strategy to appease investors. "We need to see growth accelerate," Kerry Rice, an analyst at Needham & Company, LLC in San Francisco, told Bloomberg. "However, I think it's going to take approximately 18 months to see a meaningful impact to improve traffic and search on EBay." PayPal was established in 1998 and first went public in 2002. Later that year it became a subsidiary of eBay. For more on the split, read For eBay, a new chapter begins.