PayPal valued at just under $50bn as it soars past EBay on Nasdaq
After its first day back as an independent company, PayPal is valued just under $50bn (£34bn).
Read more: EBay revenue jumps 7pc as PayPal spinoff draws near
The online payments company's share price closed up 5.43 per cent on its first day of trading after splitting from parent eBay, after initially soaring 11 per cent in early exchanges on the Nasdaq.
More than 13 years after making its first market debut, PayPal now has a market capitalisation of $47bn with shares trading at a price of $40.47, surpassing eBay's $33.2bn.
When PayPal first listed on Nasdaq in 2002 – a year before it was snapped up by EBay for $1.5bn – the company had 13m registered users. It now has 169m accounts and recorded a 16 per cent rise in revenue to $2.26bn in the last quarter.
The stock's success on Nasdaq goes some way to vindicating activist investor Carl Icahn who fronted calls for the company to split from EBay in order to free it up to work with other potential partners such as Amazon or Alibaba.
Co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel also gave their backing to the split, as eBay became an increasingly smaller platform for PayPal's payment volumes.
Yesterday PayPal chief executive Dan Schulman told Forbes that the firm now has "the flexibility to work with any potential merchant partner across the globe".