PYPL is undervalued from a perspective (9.5x forward P/E vs 15x avg) with upside potential, but growth concerns prevent a large position.

In this video, we take a look at PayPal , whose stock market symbol is PYPL. Recently, you may have noticed that the company's stock has experienced a significant jump. There were rumors about Stripe and its group acquiring it , but these rumors later turned out to be false. The stock then declined slightly.

PayPal, for its part, is trying to simplify this whole process. By the way, this image is taken directly from the PayPal website, and the essence of what they are trying to do is to simplify the entire process.

PayPal can receive different portions of the fees. Depending on the transactions shown in the top half of this image, they receive a small share of those fees. So, theoretically, the more money they process, and the more transactions they complete, the more control they have over the entire process, and the more fees they earn.

The higher their revenues, the higher their profits, and things like that .

I made a video about this company about 6 months ago, when I was monitoring the performance of its stock and it was close to its lowest levels. One of the things that concerned me most when analyzing this company was that this was already happening in some other countries.

And if you think about platforms like "Zelle", where you can make direct transfers between banks. I think one of the biggest threats to the sector in general, or to what PayPal offers, is that it is possible to go into a store, swipe your card, and your bank speaks directly to the merchant's bank .

These two parties talk directly to each other and get their money quickly and all that stuff.

This actually happens with something like "Stripe". However, before we delve into the numbers, PayPal has done a few other things to try to expand , let's say, its customers' habits .

So, one of the things they launched, especially in the UK, is what they call "PayPal Plus," which is basically a membership where you get rewards, points, and so on. The goal is to try...the way I was reading about it , they were saying their goal is to try to get customers who subscribe to "PayPal Plus" to change their habits.

Meaning they use PayPal more frequently. The more people use PayPal, the more profits they can make from a transactional perspective.

So, overall, this is probably a good sign. It is too early to say whether this will have a tangible impact on revenues or not. Initial indications suggest that it may be good, but they are not disclosing many individual figures about the size of the revenue it generates, but it looks good overall.

And now, something else they've recently introduced is advertising on PayPal. This is a screenshot directly from their website , which is an interesting concept . So, when you use the PayPal app or visit the website, the idea of advertising seems to me like a well-targeted market.

There is potential to make some profit from this. That cannot be denied . Once again, they saw some initial signs of success, and this is a business that could generate a higher profit margin, which could help their overall figures that have been under some pressure.

What is PayPal's deduction rate? Now, if you don't want to look at the numbers, one quick way to find out the deduction rate is to first look at the total volume of payments. Secondly, take a look at their revenue figures.

To get interesting results, the initial revenues look very good and continue to rise. But the real problem, and I think one of the things that has hurt PayPal's stock a lot, is the growth rate of total payment volume compared to revenue.

Revenue growth versus total payment volume growth . We can see that over the past few years , growth has slowed down. There is still positive growth. We saw that when we looked at a revenue graph.

We saw that when we looked at a graph of the total volume of payments. The numbers are indeed increasing, but the pace of growth is slowing down. It is declining in terms of growth rate.

For me, this is a double whammy, because if you go back to their early high-growth years, you get a bonus for that. For the fastest-growing companies , think about it from the perspective of the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio.

Faster-growing companies tend to trade at a higher price-to-earnings ratio than slower-growing companies. It makes sense , and is understandable if we think about it. Now that those numbers have started to slow down, well, it's affected because your earnings multiple will be affected.

This alone will lead to a decline in the stock price. Earnings per share won't grow at roughly the same rate, so, you know, there's likely to be some pressure there as well.

Now, having said that, another important distinction here is to note how the total volume of payments grows faster than revenues in almost every year. Well , what this basically tells us is that the total volume of payments is increasing faster than the increase in revenue, but this really means that the commission rate is decreasing.

So, each year, for every dollar of transactions that take place, PayPal receives a smaller percentage.

Part of that is because they pursued businesses with lower profit margins , and now they are trying to change some of that. They are in a transitional phase. We are trying to shift towards pursuing higher-margin businesses such as advertising and the like .

But in both cases, the story remains even with those intertwined here. The total volume of payments is increasing faster than the revenue. Therefore, we know that the commission rate is decreasing somewhat.

Okay, keep that in mind as we go on because it's not all bad news. When we move on to look at the operating profit margin, despite the fact that the commission rate is decreasing , they have introduced things like PayPal Plus or additional advertising and services, and things like that .

This has helped to slightly increase operating profit margins over the past few years . This is a plan for a decade. It didn't increase much, but better profit margins are still better profit margins. So, in general, we would be happy with that .

Then, as we saw in the revenues, net income is doing fairly well . So, net income was only slightly more volatile than what we saw in revenue, but net income performed well. On average, it has continued to increase .

Now, just to make sure we cover all sides, let's take a quick look at the cash and debt chart. And again, you can see that their performance is fairly good. I do n't think cash flow is a real problem for this company.

They have some debt, but they have enough cash to cover it. Overall, I would say their monetary position is almost neutral according to the latest figures. So, overall, I'm not overly concerned; This is not a company so heavily indebted that this becomes a problem.

Firstly, we can see that this looks very similar to what we saw with net income in that it was somewhat volatile , but the overall trend was upward. So, that's good.

Now, interestingly, it becomes even more appealing when we add analyst estimates to this chart. So, this is now a free cash flow graph that spans the past decade and forecasts the next five years .

Analysts expect cash flow to move somewhat sideways. It rises slightly and then falls back according to their expectations. If anything, I think this best expresses the pressures felt by a company like PayPal, not just the company, but the entire sector as well. So, this could pose a clear problem.

Therefore, on the "Investors Growth" website, they take the analyst estimates available on the site. Let's adjust this to make more room for the standard chart here, which currently shows us, using these analyst estimates.

Incidentally, we are using a permanent growth rate of 2.5%, and we will return to this shortly, but with these numbers, we have a large margin of safety. This stock is fairly valued at approximately $91 per share, using these analyst estimates and a growth rate of 2.5%.

Now, one of the problems with that is, frankly, the growth rate of 2.5%. If analysts are worried about the next five years, is our assumption of a 2.5% growth rate overstated? We choose 2.5% because it roughly represents the long-term inflation rate, which is slightly higher at the moment, but we assume it is growing at the same inflation rate.

Well, if analysts don't know whether that will happen, and if we don't want to be overly optimistic, then perhaps the fair value of $91 is overestimated.

Well, if that's the case, what if we got rid of this growth rate and reduced it to zero? So, instead of growing as expected at a rate of 2.5%, the stock will not grow but will remain the same forever.

Well, however, we can see that the fair value has decreased from $91 per share to $74 per share. Therefore, $74 per share still represents a significant upside opportunity. It appears that even with almost no growth in this stock, and when we estimate the lack of growth for the future, there is still plenty of upside potential.

Now, I was curious to see if this would hold up against another evaluation method. Therefore , based on that, we looked at the forward price-to-earnings ratio, and at 9.5 times, the stock appears to be undervalued .

The five-year average is about 15 times, and it is currently trading at 9.5 times.

So , although I'm not entirely sure that a company will acquire PayPal, I think it makes sense for some companies. I think there are many companies that might target PayPal. I think they would be a smart acquisition candidate for some companies , even large companies like Apple or similar .

They could simply buy the company; I mean, Apple is so big that it can buy them and integrate them directly into their business. So, I think this is possible.

But even if we are not certain, it seems to me that this company could be a good investment from a value perspective at the moment . As for me, I have a very small position in the stock.

It represents about 1% of my investment portfolio. So, I have a very small center in PayPal that I bought a while ago. And I admire his current situation. For me, I love it from a value perspective.

I am hesitant to make it a very large share in my portfolio simply because there are genuine growth concerns here.

I like some of the things they do . I like the idea of advertisements. I also like that they are trying to spread the "Buy via PayPal" button on more different websites. I think these are logical steps they are taking.

But they are still in a transitional phase. This is the difficult part of it . This company is no longer a growth company . This is considered a step towards transformation at this stage.

So, I'm more than happy with my small financial position here, but let me know what you think in the comments below.