Meg Whitman, president and CEO of top Internet auctioneer eBay will step down in March, confirming the rumors previously spread by a report released Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.

On January 22, the newspaper quoted sources “familiar with the matter” saying the fifty-one-year-old Whitman is ready to retire from her position as head of the online auction company, leaving her place to John Donahoe, 47, a senior executive who currently runs the company’s auction business. Whitman brought Donahoe into eBay in February 2005 from Bain & Co., a management consultancy company, overseeing 3,000 employees.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Whitman’s retirement was confirmed by eBay during a conference call Wednesday and March 31 will be her last day as leader of a company, which bloomed under her hands. The announcement came as the company posted a 53 percent surge in its fourth-quarter net profit that was far ahead of forecasts. Net income jumped to $531 million from $346.5 million a year ago.

Donahoe and Whitman have worked together for the past two years to prepare for transferring the top executive duties to Donahoe, Whitman said. “John and I have worked very closely to arrive at this day and we’ll continue to work together through the transition,” she said, according to the newspaper.

Donahoe, in turn, came with some solutions and changes to fix the problems eBay is currently having. He included on his list tweaking the way eBay charges users so they pay less up front to list an item for sale, rewarding frequent buyers with coupons to get then to buy more and featuring products available at a fixed price more prominently on the main Web site to capitalize on their growing demand.

“Meg has done an amazing job, but every company goes through a life cycle. If you look at the company’s performance and the stock price, it has been lackluster in recent years, Bob Concannon, heal of the Silicon Valley technology practice for Boyden, a San Francisco-based executive search firm told the Chicago Tribune.

Whitman, one of the most high-profile female executives in the country, decided to end her carreer at eBay on the day she would turn 10 years inside the company. When joining eBay, she stated that no chief executive should run a company more than a decade.

Whitman took the leadership of eBay in a time when the commercial Internet was just taking off and she succeeded to make it expand every year. Founded in 1995 nu entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, eBay allows individuals to buy and sell items online to the highest bidder or at a fixed price. This kind of commerce made the company’s auction business to account for more than two-thirds of eBay’s nearly $6 billion in annual revenue.

During her carrier, Whitman succeeded to expand eBay from just 29 employees to more than 11,000, turning the site into the world’s biggest auction website. She has also made possible a rising of the profit every year for the company, which now has 248 million registered users globally and 15,000 employees.

EBay’s success has made Whitman a billionaire, with her net worth recently estimated by Forbes at $104 billion.

Outside her daily duties at eBay, Whitman has close ties to U.S. politician Mitt Romney, who is campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, hosting a fundraiser for the former Massachusetts governor in her Atherton home last year.