PayPal has published its fourth quarter and full year results, which reveal the company has increased its user base and total payment volume.
The company’s revenue increased by 17%, staying true to analysts’ forecasts, to $2.981 billion. Following the company’s spin-off from eBay, PayPal has gone from strength to strength and has a higher market cap ($50 billion) than its former parent company ($36 billion).
PayPal’s results reveal a continually growing customer base and increasing usage of mobile payments. In its fourth quarter, PayPal processed 1.8 billion transactions, up 23% from Q3. Year-on-year, the number jumps to 6.1 billion and marks an increase of 24%. Its active customer accounts also increased to 197 million, up by 10%.
Special attention was drawn to the power of mobile as it accounted for one-third of total payment volume (TPV) in the fourth quarter. In the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, PayPal processed more than $2 billion in mobile payments alone.
The report said: “The 2016 holiday season demonstrated how consumers around the world are moving to mobile, as shopping becomes simpler and faster on smaller screens with mobile-optimized experiences.”
In December, the company partnered with Citi on mobile payments. As part of the deal, Citi will become the first bank to have its cards tokenised for in-store purchases using PayPal.
“I’m pleased to report that PayPal ended 2016 with another strong quarter of financial results. We extended our industry leadership by generating 18 million active customer accounts, with greater engagement than ever before. We innovated across our merchant and consumer value propositions and extended our lead in mobile payments,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal.
Other strong performers included PayPal’s Venmo, the social payments company. It processed $5.6 billion of TPV, up 126%. Then there’s Xoom, which PayPal snapped up for just under $1 billion. The company recently expanded to Japan and now operates in 56 countries.
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