PayPal Holdings (NASDAQ:PYPL) shares fell after the payment services company reported lower-than-expected revenue for the third quarter.
Shares were off 1.8% as of 11:50 a.m. in New York after the company’s first financial report to investors since it was spun out of eBay in July.
Sales totaled $2.26bn in the September quarter from $1.98bn a year earlier, the San Jose, California-based company said in a statement late on Wednesday. That was slightly lower than the $2.27bn projected by analysts, according to Capital IQ.
The company reported a profit of $301mln, or $0.25 per share, for the third quarter, from $234mln, or $0.19 per share, a year earlier.
It said a key metric measuring the profitability of each transaction, known as take rate, declined.
PayPal said it had 173mln active user accounts, up from the 157mln the company reported in the same quarter a year earlier.
“We are operating in a time when change is sweeping through the financial services industry, driven by the rise of mobile technology and the acceleration of money becoming digital,” Daniel H. Schulman, chief executive of PayPal, said in the statement.
PayPal aims to attract more customers and merchants and offer them expanded services as competition in the payments industry intensifies with startups Square Inc. and Stripe Inc. as well as Apple Inc. and Google Inc.
For the full year, PayPal reiterated its 2015 earnings forecast of $1.23 a share to $1.27 a share, excluding certain items. Analysts predicted $1.25.