PayPal’s first solo earnings: 4M new users and ‘record’ $2.26B revenue

Today PayPal beat expectations with Q3 non-GAAP earnings of $0.31 per share on quarterly revenue of $2.26 billion. Analysts were anticipating earnings of $0.29 on $2.27 billion.

The slight miss on revenue may have caused the 6 percent drop in PayPal stock prices in after-hours trading.

This quarter, PayPal’s user numbers are up from 169 million last quarter to 173 million. The company also increased its total payment volume 27 percent to $70 billion, $2.1 billion of which was processed through Venmo — its peer-to-peer app.

Since going public at the beginning of the quarter, PayPal has worked to prove its worth, announcing metrics left and right.

Aside from being its first quarter (well, first in a while) as a publicly traded company, this quarter has been fairly quiet. The company hired John D. Rainey to get PayPal’s financials in order. Meanwhile, PayPal made some tweaks to its core products, like introducing a mobile payment reading device for merchants, and expanded its reach to new platforms and new regions. It also moved further into retail shops, thanks to a deal with Macy’s, which will now accept PayPal as a form of payment at its stores.

Perhaps most notable was PayPal’s acquisition of ecommerce platform Modest, a move that signals the company will soon be expanding its online merchant offering (and perhaps better connecting it to its offline products). Modest focuses on bringing context to commerce, using user data to help present shopping experiences. We haven’t seen anything from this acquisition just yet, but those changes won’t likely go into effect until after the holiday season.

As for the remainder of the year, PayPal said it expects net annual revenues to grow 15-18 percent over last year with non-GAAP earnings ranging from $1.23 – $1.27.

We’ll be updating this story during PayPal’s Q3 earnings call, so check back.

Corrected 1:40 p.m. PT with non-rounded revenue figures — $2.26 billion, not $2.3 billion.