Paypal (PYPL) Just Delivered a Blockbuster Quarter

Paypal Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) has been around since 2000. It started as an online payment platform for sending and receiving money. It gained popularity in a short span of time, becoming one of the world’s biggest online payment processors. Paypal has been enjoying tremendous growth lately, especially during 2020, with the stock gaining more than 120 percent during the past 12 months.

The growth in recent months has mainly been driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has greatly changed the way people work, shop, and transact. The lockdown restrictions fueled the use of digital payment methods, ultimately helping online payment processing companies such as Paypal.

The company on Wednesday announced record quarterly results for the quarter ended Dec. 31. It reported earnings of $1.57 billion, or $1.32 per share for the fourth quarter, translating to a surge of nearly 3 folds from the comparable period of 2019. On an adjusted basis, profit rose to $1.08 per share, easily beating the consensus forecast of $1 per share.

CEO Dan Schulman said in a statement, “PayPal delivered record performance in 2020 as businesses of all sizes have digitized in the wake of the pandemic. In this historic year, we released more products than ever before and have dramatically scaled our acceptance worldwide, giving our 377 million consumer and merchant accounts even more reasons to use our platform.”

Revenue came in at $6.12 billion, up 23 percent from $4.96 billion in the year-ago quarter. Analysts on average were expecting Paypal to post revenue of $6.09 billion. Processed payments for the quarter climbed 39 percent to $277.1 billion. Moreover, net new active accounts in the quarter climbed by 16 million. Comparatively, Venmo’s active accounts jumped 32 percent to 70 million.

Paypal shares hit a new 52-week high of $274.94 on Thursday following the impressive quarterly results.