PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL) beat first-quarter estimates on Wednesday after it reported its quarterly financial figures.
Additionally, the company also revealed active-account information regarding its popular payment app Venmo, including figures not seen before such as total user numbers and overall earnings.
The company reported net income of around $667 million, up from $511 million during the same time last year. Overall, adjusted earnings per share went up to 78 cents from last year’s 57 cents, which came in ahead of what most Wall Street analysts had expected, around 68 cents per share. Overall, revenues also rose to $4.13 billion.
“We had a great start to the year, with strong growth in revenue, net new active accounts and engagement across our platform. We launched new strategic relationships with some of the world’s largest marketplaces and platforms including Instagram and MercadoLibre,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal. “We now have 277 million customer accounts, including 22 million merchant accounts and over 40 million active Venmo accounts. We are confident in the 2019 targets we outlined last quarter as we continue to leverage our wide range of unique assets in our global digital payments platform.”
PayPal also said that it added 9.3 million new active accounts in the first quarter, a further 15 percent year-over-year increase. Venmo ended up having 40 million users at the end of the first quarter, with total payments from the service has grown by 73 percent from last year and is on pace to do $300 million in revenue in 2019.
However, Venmo is still far from being profitable, with PayPal still not giving any specific dates for when they expect Venmo to start making a profit for them.
“Venmo continues its significant momentum. As user growth continues to accelerate, merchants are increasingly turning to Venmo as a way to attract a valuable and engaged consumer base,” said the company’s CEO in a conference call with analysts. “We’re certainly pleased with the monetization of Venmo and the rate at which that is progressing. We have certainly seen great demand across our user base for more and more products from Venmo, and we are engaging with the banking system in a very broad way across PayPal and Venmo. To be very clear, there is nothing beyond Venmo debit card that we are looking at this time,” added PayPal’s COO, Bill Ready, in the call.
Shares of PayPal stayed relatively the same throughout most of Wednesday, but after-hours trading saw shares dip surprisingly around two percent suddenly over the course of a half-hour.
Despite the strong performance PayPal had in the first quarter, some had expected volume figures for Venmo to be a tad bit higher. However, this decrease turned around within an hour, with prices staying around the same level they were earlier today, up 0.3 percent.
PayPal Company profile
PayPal provides electronic payment solutions to merchants and consumers. The company’s digital wallet securely and conveniently stores customer account data. PayPal also facilitates payment processing for merchants.
The company earns revenue through transaction fees and by providing a variety of other financial services, including lending. – Warrior Trading News
