PayPal has gotten a lift as the pandemic sent shoppers online.
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Investors can’t get enough of PayPal Holdings, pushing its market value past Mastercard ‘s.
Shares of PayPal (ticker: PYPL) have rocketed 31% this year, including a 2.7% gain on Tuesday, to around $306. PayPal’s market value is now $359 billion. Mastercard ‘s equity, meanwhile, was worth $339 billion at recent prices around $341.
Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V), the two major card-processing networks, have been hurt by a slowdown in payment volumes related to the pandemic, particularly in highly profitable cross-border transactions. Both stocks are down around 4% this year and are largely flat over the past 52 weeks.
PayPal, on the other hand, got a lift as the pandemic sent shoppers online and fueled a surge in digital payments. The company is also developing new revenue streams, aiming to become a digital payments “super app,” expanding into everything from Bitcoin to in-store QR-codes, international money transfers, and new peer-to-peer (P2P) services.
PayPal outlined its five-year strategy in a presentation to investors last week. And some analysts were clearly impressed. Lisa Ellis of MoffettNathanson raised her price target on the stock to $350, reflecting a variety of sources of growth.
Just about every facet of the business may be poised to double over the next five years. PayPal expects to have 750 million active accounts by 2025, up from 377 million now. It sees total payments volume expanding at a 25% annualized rate, reaching $2.8 trillion by 2025. Revenues are expected to hit more than $50 billion, up from an estimated $25.6 billion this year.
PayPal also expects to boost adjusted operating margins from 25% to 28%, and sees earnings per share rising an average 22% a year. It’s planning to generate $40 billion in free cash flow over the next five years, targeting 30% to 40% for share repurchases.
As Ellis points out, PayPal has several stepping stones to hit those targets. One is a new service called Buy Now Pay Later, an interest-free installment plan for consumer purchases. The service is gaining traction, with $750 million of transaction volume in the fourth quarter.
Another growth driver is cryptocurrencies. PayPal users can now buy and store Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on its app. The company aims to allow crypto to be used as a funding source with the 28 million merchants on its platform, acting as a middleman between consumers and businesses. Bitcoin hit a record $50,000 on Tuesday, up 75% this year, and it appears to be driving greater usage of PayPal, which could ultimately lead to higher average revenue per customer.
PayPal also aims to use its Venmo P2P service as a platform for consumer-to-business payments. And PayPal is making inroads with brick-and-mortar merchants through QR technology for contactless payments in stores.
Does all of this warrant a higher market value and a steep premium to Mastercard stock? The card network is actually expected to lift revenue and profits at a faster pace in fiscal 2021, according to Ellis, growing revenue 21.7% versus 19% for PayPal. She also sees Mastercard’s earnings per share rising 33.3% versus 17.5% for PayPal’s.
But the five-year outlook is clearly more favorable for PayPal, with revenue rising 21% a year, compared with 15% for Mastercard, and earnings compounding at a 22% rate, versus 17% for Mastercard.
The question is whether PayPal’s valuation is getting too rich. At 67 times estimated 2021 per-share earnings, PayPal stock is trading nearly three times more expensive than the S&P 500’s P/E ratio of 23 times earnings. Mastercard goes for 42 times 2021 earnings.
Nonetheless, Wall Street can’t seem to catch up with PayPal’s fast-rising stock. The average target for the stock price is $309, less than 2% above the recent level.
“You have to appreciate the earnings power in the model,” says Wedbush analyst Moshe Katri, who maintained a $300 target on the stock after the presentation last week. “The more they’re able to expand user engagement and get to point where users keep going back and using its products, the more the user fees can go up.”
Whether that means the stock can keep climbing will depend on how quickly it can turn into the super-app that Wall Street has come to expect.
Write to Daren Fonda at [email protected]
