DUBLIN: Profits at PayPal’s Ireland-based European services unit more than halved to €4.3m last year, as its administrative expenses jumped to €163.3m from €141m, newly-filed accounts for the company show. Revenue at PayPal Europe Services, which is overseen by vice president for the EMEA, Louise Phelan, rose to €168.2m from €152m.It paid €1.5m in corporation tax, the accounts show.
PayPal employs 2,600 people between operations in Dundalk and Dublin, and it’s expected to increase its staff numbers to 3,000 by the end of 2018.
Ms Phelan assumed her expanded role last week. She had previously been vice president for global operations, EMEA. She now has responsibility for growing revenue and customers for PayPal in more than 100 countries. The PayPal Europe Services unit provides customer support services, risk operations services, corporate administrative services and other shared services on behalf of the PayPal group.
The accounts for the business show that its retained earnings stood at €42.7m at the end of 2015, and that it paid a total of €82.8m in wages to staff. It also paid €2.3m in redundancy costs last year, up from €322,000 a year earlier.
The aggregate pay for the company’s three directors in the year was €507,000. PayPal Europe Services said in its accounts that it will continue to deliver a “superb” end-to-end customer experience, “to enable consumers and merchants to pay and get paid virtually anywhere, any time, and on any internet-connected device”.
PayPal faces competition from companies such as Stripe, the payments firm that was founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison. Ebay spun off its PayPal unit into a separate listed company last year.
Following that separation, outstanding stock-based awards grated to PayPal employees under Ebay’s equity incentive scheme were converted into PayPal awards. Shares in PayPal, which has a market capitalisation of $50bn, have risen by a third over the past year.
Ms Phelan – who is also a non-executive director of Ryanair – is exempt from reporting her holdings in PayPal in the accounts for PayPal Europe Services.
Reporting second-quarter results in July, PayPal said its revenue rose 15pc to $2.65bn. Net income was up 6pc at $323m. It processed 1.4bn transactions in the period, up 25pc.
