PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL) is in focus on Friday after the digital payments giant reported better-than-expected profit for its fiscal fourth quarter.
Should you buy PayPal stock?
The multinational is now calling for $4.87 of adjusted per-share earnings this year that also topped $4.79 a share that experts had forecast. Still, Macquarie Capital’s Paul Golding said on Yahoo Finance:
Are you looking for fast-news, hot-tips and market analysis?
Sign-up for the Invezz newsletter, today.
With some new entrants, or maybe not so new, but scaled entrants that are gaining recognition and penetration in the marketplace, this may not be as clear cut a story. Even on the call, mgmt. was a bit downbeat on eCommerce backdrop.
He did, however, stock to his outperform rating on the PayPal stock. Golding’s new price target of $115 still represents about a 50% upside from here.
CEO Dan Schulman is retiring
More importantly, CEO Dan Schulman announced plans of stepping down by the end of the current year. He will, however, remain on the company’s board. PayPal is yet to announce a successor. Golding added:
Given where PayPal finds itself right now, they need an innovator and a visionary to not just ensure that PayPal retains its place in the market, but to provide a compelling offering to go into new channels and new markets.
For the year, PayPal stock is currently up roughly 5.0%.
PayPal adds 2.9 million new accounts
Last month, PayPal revealed plans of lowering its headcount by about 7.0%. Costs related to restructuring, it said last night, would result in about a $100 million charge in Q1.
Net new adds were 2.9 million in the recent quarter. PayPal now has 435 million total active accounts – up 2.0% for the year. Golding also said:
BNPL is a space where they were not the incumbent. So, to note that they drove $20 billion of volume on BNPL on fiscal 2022 across 30 million customers is a significant achievement.
Notable figures in PayPal’s earnings print
- Earned $921 million versus the year-ago $801 million
- Per-share earnings climbed from 68 cents to 81 cents
- Adjusted EPS printed at $1.24 as per the press release
- Revenue jumped 7.0% year-on-year to $7.38 billion
- Consensus was $1.20 of EPS on $7.39 billion revenue
- $357.4 billion of TPV was slightly below estimates
Source: https://invezz.com/news/2023/02/10/buy-paypal-stock-q4-earnings-ceo-retire/