PayPal’s earnings report gives investors lots to look forward to

PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) jumped 9% yesterday after giving investors lots to look forward to on its earnings report. PayPal’s earnings and sales came in ahead of expectations, but the big news came from these initiatives:

• Cost-cutting program — expected to save $900M in costs this year and $1.3B the following year.
• Share buyback program of $15B.

Those cost savings were higher than analysts expected and could give $PYPL a boost if executed. Mizuho analyst Dan Dolev sees these moves as “positives” — and that PayPal’s costs were too high (MW).

Addition by subtraction: CEO Dan Schulman said PayPal was trying to do 100 things — but is now focused on “doing three or four things extremely well.” This includes:

• Moving employees from working on its stock trading feature to concentrating on its core checkout business.
• Pulling back from its previously launched QR Code program and refocusing on PayPal-linked cards.

At 429M active accounts (5% of the world’s population) — nearly the same as the previous quarter — PayPal has shifted focus to monetizing its existing user base instead of growing it.

Elliott X PayPal collab: Activist investor Elliott Management said they owned a $2B stake in PayPal — putting them as one of PayPal’s five largest shareholders. In PayPal’s earnings call, Schulman said they’re aligned with Elliott’s goals “to maximize shareholder value.”

Investors like PayPal’s plan, but now comes the hard part: execution.

Catch up: How do activist investors impact companies and their stock returns?