PayPal keeps streak of earnings beats alive following best-ever quarter for account growth

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PayPal Holdings Inc. has beaten or met earnings expectations in every quarter that it’s been a stand-alone company, and that streak continued Wednesday.

The payments company reported 69 cents per share in adjusted earnings for the fourth quarter, up from 55 cents a year ago. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had modeled 67 cents in EPS for the quarter.

Including this latest quarter, PayPal














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 has beaten the EPS consensus in 12 of the 15 quarters since its 2015 split from eBay, while matching expectations in the other three.

GAAP net income for the fourth quarter fell to $584 million from $620 million. The company posted 49 cents in GAAP EPS, down a cent from a year earlier.

Shares are down 3.7% in after-hours trading.

PayPal grew revenue to $4.23 billion from $3.69 billion in the period, coming in about even with the consensus projection. The online payments pioneer saw $164 billion in total payment volume flow through its network, up from $131 billion a year earlier. Volume from eBay Inc.’s














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marketplace didn’t grow during the period, the company said.

The payments giant projects first-quarter earnings per share of 66 cents to 68 cents and revenue of $4.08 billion to $4.13 billion. Analysts have been modeling 68 cents in EPS and $4.16 billion in revenue for the period. PayPal affirmed its prior full-year outlook, issued in conjunction with its last earnings release, which called for $2.84 to $2.91 in EPS and $17.85 billion to $18.1 billion in revenue.

The company ended the quarter with 267 million active accounts in total, adding a net of 13.8 million during the period. Excluding impacts from acquisitions, the company added almost 11 million accounts, marking its best performance on the metric in its history. The average active account conducted 36.9 payment transactions through PayPal on a trailing twelve-month basis, the company disclosed in its earnings release.

Venmo, the social peer-to-peer payments app owned by PayPal, processed about $19 billion in volume during the period, up from $10.4 billion in the prior holiday quarter. PayPal said this marked the second-straight quarter in which Venmo surpassed eBay Inc. in total payment volume on PayPal’s platform.

Total peer-to-peer volume across the company’s network, which includes transfers sent through the core PayPal service, amounted to $39 billion.

Rival money-transfer Zelle, which is the banks’ answer to Venmo, announced last week that it saw payment volume of $35 billion for the December period, more than what Venmo itself experienced but below the total amount of transaction flows across PayPal’s broader peer-to-peer suite.



Source : MTV