In January, about a hundred days into his job as PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) CEO, Alex Chriss told reporters that the payments company hadn’t had much to celebrate in recent years. But Chriss confidently said he was prepared to “shock the world.”
Dan Dolev of Mizuho Securities was among the skeptics. He cut his rating to the equivalent of a hold on Jan. 16, headlining his report, “PayPal faces competitive pressure from ‘A’ to ‘Z.’” The A was for Apple Pay, and the Z represented payments app Zelle, a money transfer service jointly owned by seven of the top U.S. banks.
A few weeks later, PayPal issued weak guidance in its fourth-quarter earnings report, knocking the stock down 11% and justifying Dolev’s concerns.
PayPal appeared to be in deep trouble. Its market cap was down more than 80% since peaking in mid-2021. The company had just cut 9% of it workforce, about 2,500 jobs, and was mired in single-digit growth.
Fast forward to today, and the picture is dramatically brighter for the 26-year-old Silicon Valley company and its 47-year-old CEO.
Chriss hit his one-year anniversary at the helm on Friday. In the third quarter, which ended on Monday, PayPal shares jumped 34%, their biggest quarterly rally since mid-2020, when the early days of the COVID pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping. It was the first time in eight quarters that PayPal outperformed the Nasdaq, which gained just 2.6% in the past three months.
PYPL shares dipped $1.41, or 1.8%, to $76.63.
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