Boasting a 41% market share, PayPal (Nasdaq: PYPL) is the owner of the single most dominant online payment technology in the world. However, to say that the market has given up on shares of this company would be a major understatement. The stock's recent collapse has been severe. In July 2021, it peaked at just over $300. Today, the shares change hands for around $60. Over the past five years, the stock is down a very disappointing 37%. Operationally, though, PayPal's performance doesn't look too bad to me. While the five-year stock chart goes way down, the five-year revenue chart shows that PayPal is still growing quite nicely. What stalled PayPal's stock price wasn't a lack of revenue growth; it was a drop in operating income. While revenue has continued to grow, operating profits haven't. PayPal's operating income went from $3.3 billion in 2020... To $4.3 billion in 2021... Then back down to $3.8 billion in 2022. So the company did see decent growth over that span. But the market clearly did not care for the decrease in operating income from 2021 to 2022. When a growth company stops growing, the stock market can be ruthless in its valuation of that company's stock. The chart below shows how dramatically PayPal's valuation has fallen. When the stock was at its peak in 2021, investors were valuing the company at over 100 times trailing earnings. As you can see, the market is willing to pay a steep price for companies it thinks are going to grow at a nice clip for a very long time. The shift toward digital payments during the pandemic also got investors excited about PayPal's stock. There's no doubt PayPal was overvalued when it was trading at 100 times earnings. But now that the market has soured on its future growth, the shares are valued much more attractively. Here's the thing, though... I don't think PayPal's growth is anywhere close to being done. |
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