Forum Moderators: buckworks
The company has set a range of $12 to $14 for its 5.4 million share offering, which is being underwritten by Salomon Smith Barney. The shares are scheduled to be priced Wednesday night and debut Thursday, Salomon said. PayPal will trade under the symbol "PYPL."
From a SF Chronicle article [sfgate.com]:
PayPal, created in 1999, is now a giant of online bill payments. The firm said it had 12.8 million customer accounts at the end of 2001 and added 24,400 accounts daily in the fourth quarter.
[thestreet.com...]
The company says it plans to use the money to buy equipment, improve processing of payments and expand overseas.
[wired.com...]
It's one of the few stocks (other than ebay) I've been positive about for quite awhile. I think in just a few years time, PayPal will challenge Visa/MC worldwide as the defacto online payment method.
PayPal started as the defacto online payment method before Visa/MC knew what the web was. Now Visa/MC is the defacto standard because of better web security standards and because of brand recognition.
PayPal doesn't have the brand recognition that Visa has, but this ipo will help them gain recognition. PayPal is the choice for small e-bay type transactions. They'll have to work hard to become the choice for larger purchases and larger merchants.
Buyers like PayPal because it's free. For sellers, it's more expensive than Visa/MC unless you do a very large volume of sales.
[speculation]
Buyers who use PayPal tend not to have Visa/MC cards. That implies either bad credit or youth. Not a lot of buying power.
[/speculation]
[story.news.yahoo.com...]
Personally, I'm not gonna be too interested until it has had a bit of time to trade. It's kinda hard to read charts that only show one days worth of trading data :)
