- PayPal is planning to make some big acquisitions in the payments sector next year
PayPal is planning to make some major acquisitions in the payments sector next year. This news comes on the heels of PayPal buying shopping and rewards platform company Honey for $4 billion last month.
“There’s a lot of opportunities to acquire companies inorganically,” said PayPal Chief Financial Officer and EVP of Global Customer Operations John Rainey said in an interview via The WSJ.
Recently, PayPal also completed the acquisition of a 70% stake in a Chinese payments company called Guofubao Information Technology Co. (GoPay).
“We are honored to become the first foreign payment platform to be licensed to provide online payment services in China. We look forward to partnering with China’s financial institutions and technology platforms, providing a more comprehensive set of payment solutions to businesses and consumers, both in China and globally,” said PayPal in a statement about the deal.
In the past two years, PayPal has been pursuing aggressive acquisitions in the range of $1 billion to $3 billion. And the company spent over $7 billion in acquisitions in the past two years. The plan is to continue looking in that range next year.
Wedbush Securities equity research analyst Moshe Katri pointed out that PayPal needs to ensure it finds the right targets due to all the competition in the space.
“There’s a long list of privately held companies in this space,” added Katri via The WSJ. “The challenge is to find the right fit.”
Some of the other big deals that have been made recently in the space include Fidelity National Information Services buying Worldpay for $35 billion. Global Payments acquired Total System Services for $21.5 billion. Last year, PayPal spend $2.2 billion buying Swedish financial-technology startup iZettle AB.
