PayPal continues to surge

Article Excerpt

PAYPAL HOLDINGS INC. $42 (Nasdaq symbol PYPL; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Finance sector; Shares outstanding: 1.2 billion; Market cap: $50.4 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 4.9; No dividends paid; TSINetwork Rating: Above Average; www.paypal.com) processes online transactions. Customers can also now use PayPal to pay for purchases at retail stores. In the three months ended September 30, 2016, the company earned $425 million, or $0.35 a share. That’s up 12.7% from $395 million, or $0.31, a year earlier. Revenue rose 18.1%, to $2.7 billion from $2.3 billion. PayPal gets nearly half of its revenue from customers outside of the U.S. If you exclude currency rates, revenue improved 21%. During the quarter, the company added 19 million active users for a total of 192 million. In addition, the number of transactions per account jumped 24.3%. PayPal has also attracted more merchants to its network. Recent additions include fashion retailer H&M, Costco (Mexico), Yelp (social networking), and Yandex Direct (a Russian Internet search engine). It ended the quarter…