Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is also the CEO of payments company Square. While Twitter is plagued with quitting executives, increasing losses and stagnant userbase, his other company at least, appears to be doing significantly better. Square has released its earnings reports and has managed to beat wall street expectations. Although it operated in loss, the losses were less than what was being expected.
Square has announced a loss of merely $0.04 per share — on total revenues of somewhere around $452 million, for Q4 of 2016. Wall Street on the other hand, had predicted a $0.09 loss per share on total revenues of $450 million for the quarter. So yeah, in a manner of speaking, the company fell short of analyst expectations — which is of course, the best possible result when analysts are expecting you to go into loss.
The company also showed significant year over year growth. Last year, Square showed up losses of $0.34 per share on revenues of $374.4 million in quarter 4. So yeah, this year wad pretty cool by comparison. Moving into the why, Square showed growth in almost every area of business with traditional payment showing 30 percent+ growth. That is a lot by any standards. Meanwhile Square capital and the company’s other mew age products have also contributed significantly to the company’s recent growth.
Revenue wise, the payments company exhibited a total gross payment volume of $13.7 billion. Compare it to last year and you have a 34 spike. This is pretty much similar to the full year growth that saw Square process billion worth of payments and mark a growth of 39 percent over 2015.
Along with catering to a lot of small and medium businesses in 2016, Square was also able to facilitate over 40,000 business loans that had a total value of over $248 million. Loans are of course important for any payments business, as eventually, they lead to profits — unless of course, the person who has taken the loan defaults, which generally does not happen. This statistics also shows a growth of almost 68 percent over the fourth quarter a year ago.
Finally, hardware sales (yes, Square sells hardware like card readers) had showed some growth and contributed $8.9 million to the company’s coffers. Meanwhile, at least a quarter of Square’s revenue came from forward looking services launched after 2014. The services include the likes of Invoices, Instant Deposits, API access.
