PayPal Stock Tumbles 17% as Ebay Impacts Weigh on Earnings Outlook

PayPal Holdings Inc. largely matched expectations for its holiday quarter but delivered an earnings forecast that came up shy of expectations.

The payment-technology company reported fourth-quarter net income of $801 million, or 68 cents a share, down from $1.56 billion, or $1.32 a share, a year prior. On an adjusted basis, PayPal (PYPL) earned $1.11 a share, up from $1.08 a share a year earlier, while the FactSet consensus was for $1.12 a share.

PayPal's revenue came in at $6.9 billion for the fourth quarter, matching the FactSet consensus. A year prior, PayPal logged quarterly revenue of $6.1 billion.

The latest quarterly revenue performance brought PayPal's annual total to $25.4 billion for 2021, up from $21.5 billion a year earlier.

The company saw $340 billion in fourth-quarter total payment volume, slightly below the FactSet consensus, which was for $345 billion. The TPV metric captures the dollar value of transactions running through PayPal's platform.

PayPal had 426 million active accounts as of the end of 2021.

Chief Executive Dan Schulman told MarketWatch that PayPal was seeing better-than-expected traction for its redesigned app, which focuses on a broader set of financial-services tools. The new app has helped spur new interest in PayPal's crypto-buying feature and driven a sharp increase in the number of users who visit a merchant's site based on seeing a deal offer on PayPal's shopping hub.

Shares were off 17% in after-hours trading Tuesday as the company's outlook came in light of expectations. For the first half of the year, the company sees continued headwinds from eBay Inc. $(EBAY)$, which has been migrating volume away from PayPal as part of its own payments evolution.

"If you can look beyond the eBay transition, which we have five more months to go through... and you look past the lapping of the very high quarters of growth that we had last year, you can see a very consistent and strong story about the core underlying business," Schulman told MarketWatch.

Looking to the first quarter, PayPal anticipates revenue growth of about 6%, or 14% when excluding impacts from eBay Inc.

The FactSet consensus calls for $6.76 billion in quarterly sales, which would be up about 12% from the $6.03 billion that PayPal reported a year earlier.

The company also projects first-quarter adjusted earnings per share of about 87 cents, while the FactSet consensus is for $1.16.

For the full year, the company expects growth in total payment volume of 19% to 22% at spot rates as well as revenue growth of 15% to 17%. PayPal also anticipates $4.60 a share to $4.75 a share in adjusted earnings for 2022. The FactSet consensus is for $5.21 in adjusted earnings.

PayPal expects that its revenue growth will accelerate as the year goes on and Schulman anticipate that the "lapping noises" should go away in the third quarter.

A look beyond that underscores the "strength of the platform" and "should give a ton of confidence and optimism that we will exit the year at 20%-plus [revenue growth]," he told MarketWatch.