PayPal starts trading above $40 and it’s already worth billions more than eBay

PayPal started trading on the Nasdaq this morning at $41.46 per share.

As an independently traded company, Paypal is already valued at roughly $50 billion. Compare that with eBay’s market cap of about $33.64 billion. After spinning off PayPal, eBay’s stock was trading down at $26.89 this morning.

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This is PayPal’s second stint as a publicly traded company. It first debuted under the ticker symbol PYPL in 2002. Shortly thereafter it was acquired by eBay.

PayPal is at the center of a booming market for mobile payments. Major players like Google, Samsung, and Apple have all launched mobile wallets to cash in on the wave of shoppers making purchases from their smartphones. These pioneering shoppers aren’t just paying through apps on their phones or on mobile web browsers, they’re using their phones to transmit credit card information to a growing number of retail establishments that accept NFC payments.

In the past several years, PayPal has been bullishly acquiring new payments technologies to build out its signature payment processing platform. These include Braintree, which processes payments for the likes of AirBnb and Uber, and Xoom, a global money transfer service. Through its acquisition of Braintree, PayPal also scooped up the popular peer-to-peer payments app Venmo.

PayPal wants to be the place consumers go for money services, whether that means sending money to the friend who spotted you for dinner or to your family overseas. It also wants to be the go-to app for mobile shopping. In addition to its consumer apps, PayPal has built out a large offering of tools for businesses, such as payment processing apps, and hardware for physical retail outlets as well as online stores. In addition, it gives businesses access to cash with its Working Capital program.

So while it’s operating in what has become a competitive space, it’s also offering the most comprehensive set of money-related services.

“We have 17,000 people across the world and all we do is concentrate on digital payments,” said PayPal CEO Dan Schulman during an interview with Bloomberg this morning.

In 2014 PayPal processed $235 billion transactions, generating more than $8 billion in revenue.