PayPal joins S&P 500 after split from eBay

Online payments giant PayPal will begin trading as a standalone stock today, following its split from eBay.

PayPal will trade under the stock symbol PYPL, which the company had before being acquired by eBay in 2002 for approximately $1.5 billion.

In September last year, eBay announced the spin off of its PayPal payments unit into a separate publicly traded company.

PayPal will join the S&P indexes, replacing offshore drilling company Noble in the S&P 500, and taking the place of its parent eBay in the S&P 100.

Considering PayPal’s faster growth, it is likely it will become a bigger company by market value following the break up from eBay.

PayPal’s revenue jumped 19 per cent to $7.9 billion (€7.2 billion) last year, compared with eBay’s marketplace sales growth of 6 per cent.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is due to post its fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow.

Analysts believe the software and technology company will report earnings per share of $0.56 for the current quarter. For the quarter to March end, Microsoft reported earnings per share of $0.62.

Sales down

Sales are forecast to be $22.084 billion (€20.2 billion), down from the previous year’s $23.382 billion. As a result, the company’s pre-tax profits are expected to decline from $6.5 billion in 2014 to $6.02 billion (€5.5 billion).

The results come in the run-up to the launch of Windows 10, which will be Satya Nadella’s first major product launch since he took over as chief executive in February 2014.

Though Microsoft’s operating system is declining as a percentage of total revenues, it still makes up 15 per cent.

Microsoft will begin distributing Windows 10 on July 29th, but new PCs with the software won’t be available until some weeks later

Also reporting results this week is Qualcomm, which is due to report quarterly earnings on Wednesday. Analysts have forecast earnings per share of $4.73, down from its previous estimate of $4.78 a share.