PayPal reported its first-quarter results after the bell on Wednesday, sending shares up about 3 percent in after-hours trading, due to better-than-expected numbers.
Adjusted earnings per share for the payments giant came in at 57 cents, above analyst estimates of 54 cents. Revenue for the quarter was $3.69 billion, up 24 percent from last year. Analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance had been expecting $3.59 billion.
This comes from $132 billion in total payment volume, with $49 billion coming from mobile transactions. The company touted four consecutive quarters of accelerating revenue growth.
PayPal also raised guidance, expecting revenue for the next quarter to be between $3.78 billion and $3.83 billion. For the year, it is expected to be between $15.2 billion and $15.4 billion.
An early leader in online payments, PayPal’s core business remains its button, which makes it easy to make purchases across a multitude of sites. These days PayPal also owns Braintree, a white label mobile payments platform used by companies like Uber and Airbnb.
PayPal also broke out results for Venmo, its popular peer-to-peer payments app. It processed $40 billion in payments over the last year and $12 billion in the first quarter. Venmo does not yet take a cut on most of these transactions.
PayPal added 8.1 million active accounts. Its average customer makes 34.7 transactions per year, an 8 percent increase from prior years.
PayPal repurchased 23.6 million shares of common stock last quarter, returning $1.83 billion to shareholders.
PayPal’s stock has doubled in the past year, but at $74, shares are beneath the high of $85 we saw last quarter. The company dipped following its last earnings report on news that eBay is looking to partner with competitor Adyen; eBay customers can still pay with PayPal, but Adyen is transitioning to become the default selection.
PayPal and eBay were previously the same company, but the two separated in 2015. PayPal is the larger of the two businesses, with a market cap of nearly $88 billion; eBay is worth less than $42 billion.
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