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On Wednesday, 12 March 2025, Payoneer Global Inc (NASDAQ: PAYO) presented at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum, highlighting a record year in 2024 and a promising outlook for 2025. Despite challenges like potential tariffs, the company showcased its strategic growth initiatives and financial resilience, focusing on expanding its financial services and geographic reach.
Key Takeaways
- Payoneer achieved $80 billion in volume and $721 million in core revenue in 2024, marking a 20% growth.
- The company turned around a $25 million loss in 2023 to a $14 million adjusted EBITDA in 2024.
- Payoneer plans to triple its core business adjusted EBITDA in 2025, aiming for over $40 million.
- Strategic focus includes expanding its B2B business and geographic diversification, especially in Latin America and APAC.
- The company executed $137 million in stock buybacks at $5.6 per share, reflecting confidence in future prospects.
Financial Results
- 2024 Achievements:
- $80 billion in transaction volume
- $721 million in core revenue, a 20% increase from the previous year
- Transitioned from a $25 million loss in 2023 to $14 million in adjusted EBITDA
- 2025 Guidance:
- Expected 3x growth in adjusted EBITDA to over $40 million
- Anticipated 15% core revenue growth
- Adjusted EBITDA expected to remain flat year-over-year despite a $40 million interest revenue headwind
- Customer Balances:
- $7 billion in customer balances, up 9% year-over-year
Operational Updates
- B2B Growth:
- B2B business saw over 40% growth, accounting for 25% of total volume
- Geographic Diversification:
- Focus on Latin America and APAC as the fastest-growing markets
- Product Usage:
- 53% of customers use three or more AP products, an increase from 40% in Q1 2022
- Card Business:
- 36% growth in Q4, with six consecutive quarters of over 30% growth
Future Outlook
- Revenue and Business Growth:
- Targeting mid-term revenue growth of 15-25%
- Forecasting 25% growth in the B2B sector for 2025
- Strategic Acquisitions:
- Exploring acquisitions in spend management software and expanding licensing in China
- Customer Strategy:
- Emphasis on cross-selling and increasing product usage among existing customers
Q&A Highlights
- Tariffs Impact:
- Confidence in Chinese sellers’ ability to adapt to tariff changes
- E-commerce Trends:
- Aligning with high single-digit growth in e-commerce marketplaces
- Share Buybacks:
- Continued authorization and execution of share buybacks
In conclusion, Payoneer’s presentation at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum underscores its robust financial performance and strategic initiatives for sustainable growth. For further details, please refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Wolfe Research FinTech Forum:
Unidentified speaker: And now and, first of all, thank you everyone again for joining us on day two of the Wolf FinTech Forum. Really happy to have John, the CEO of Payoneer with us, which I was just mentioning to John. I mean, it it was an amazing year last year. I think there were more investors recognizing what the story has, and how differentiated the company actually is in terms of really just cross border payments, business payments, and really enabling companies to do to have systems that are much more efficient for themselves. And I still think there’s an enormous runway of awareness out there, for for room for investors to really know what you have to offer.
So, you know, with that said, I mean, maybe just take a step back. This is also, you know, for here, for those here and those on the webcast. Just give us a sense of what is pain you’re doing that’s differentiated? What do you guys, you know, maybe remind us of the business mix? And I’d love to hear a little bit more also in terms of what drove such a strong year last year.
What was your success last year? Your stock did well last year. Obviously, the market’s overall correcting now. But growth really accelerated on a core basis last year quite a bit too. So if we could just start with a recap of the business and, and last year as well.
John, CEO, Payoneer: So So first of all, it’s great to be here and excited to talk about the business we’re building and the opportunity in front of us. So we are solving a really important point of pain for global cross border entrepreneurs and SMBs. Businesses that operate cross border, that have entities in multiple geographies need a full financial stack to manage 100% of their accounts receivable and 100% of their accounts payable. Yep. And we are perfectly positioned to provide that for them.
We have the license infrastructure. We do business in 190 countries. We have the relationships with the world’s largest marketplaces, as you know. We have a fast growing and dynamic B2B business, which is really powering our growth. We have the brand and the awareness.
So we sit at the four most interesting intersections in payments, we think. B2B, cross border, SMB and emerging markets. In the markets where over 50% of the GDP is cross border, where it’s powered by SMBs, Payoneer is the provider of choice. And your question about our success in 2024 was no accident. We actually laid out and articulated in September of twenty twenty three a very clear strategy to build the full financial stack for global cross border SMBs, and we’re well on the way to deliver that.
As you said, ’24, a record year, dollars 80,000,000,000 of volume flowing on the Payoneer platform, $721,000,000 of core revenue, up 20%. The year before that, 5% revenue growth. Right. So we had a powerful growth here driven by the success of our sellers that sell on marketplaces and over 40% growth in our B2B business. And most importantly, and this is important for folks listening or here in the room, we drove core business profitability.
We went from 2023, the core business, net of interest, losing $25,000,000 to 2024, dollars ’14 million of core business adjusted EBITDA. So we powerful revenue growth and exciting leverage unlock in the business. And as we’ve guided to 2025, we’re going to 3x that core business adjusted EBITDA to north of $40,000,000 So what’s working at Payoneer? A lot, actually. Our sellers that sell on marketplaces are seeing strong growth and those growth rates are normalizing to e commerce growth rates.
As we look at consumer behavior and marketplaces, marketplaces still represent a fraction of total retail volume. And if we think over decades, not days, are more important to the consumption of goods globally, not just in the West, but even in emerging markets, right? As emerging market economies look more and more like Western market economies, marketplaces will continue to grow. So there’s a growth driver in our business there as well as our B2B franchise. The B2B business, which is 25% or so of our overall volume, 40% plus growth, shows, I think, to investors globally that the solution for cross border SMBs happens at Pioneer.
And we’re pretty excited about where we sit and the multiyear trajectory of the firm. We had guided at our investor day to mid term growth at 1525% adjusted EBITDA. We’ve reaffirmed that. We feel comfortable and confident in the opportunity in front of us. We are disciplined on our costs.
Headcount has been flat at Payoneer for two years. I took 9% of the company out July of twenty twenty three and have held headcount largely flat, which is driving leverage unlock in our P and L. So when we look at the multi year, multi decade future of Payoneer, it is true the market’s corrected. There’s uncertainty in the market. The last thirty days have been dynamic.
The value creation’s in front of Payoneer. And so we’re focused on our customers.
Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I mean, you’ve definitely identified how to monetize customers and treat the right customers, you know, in a way that’s a real business model versus, you know, I’d I’d say a couple years back, it was it was almost a little bit more you would, you know, apply more general pricing practices. You’re you’re a much more selective business now in terms of where you really, you know, apply pricing, which is the right approach. When we think of guidance, you mentioned your 15% outlook, 15 or plus percent outlook in terms of growth longer term, but and you just guided there actually for this year, for ’25. Right?
So we came out of and we exited, I think it was 25% or 26% growth at the end of fourth quarter, core revenue growth, I should say, 17% overall, but volumes up 18%. As you mentioned, B2B growing almost 40%. Again, you’re expecting 15%, which as much as that’s still very good, it shows that it was concerned it looked at by investors as either conservative or something slowing down. And I’d love for you to address that a little bit because it was a common question we got coming out of the last quarter. So just help us bridge the assumptions moving from that 26% exit rate versus the mid teens outlook.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. It’s an interesting question, right? 2024, ’20 ’1 percent volume growth, 20% revenue growth ex interest. The note on my note card is I’m happy, proud, and confident. That’s the honest answer.
Right? Like, we had an awesome year in 2024. Yep. And that’s awesome, driven by marketplace volume, which grew mid teens versus our guidance, which was high single digits. And that’s important because, you know, sellers, Payoneer customers who sell on Walmart or Amazon or eBay or Etsy or Mercado Libre, all of those platforms, are competing to drive growth for themselves.
And we saw throughout 2024, we were pretty prudent was the word we used. We said, hey, we’re not we don’t want to get in front of the consumer. And those marketplaces performed really well, and we were a beneficiary of that. In the b to b, as you said, we guided to 25% last year and delivered 42%. So when I look at our 2025 guide in the context of 42% revenue growth over twenty four months and and show that we’re guiding to 15% growth, which was our Investor Day target, the reaction from shareholders has been frankly perplexing a little bit because, you know, the the view we have is the multi year opportunity to just serve customers.
You remember our September 23 Investor Day. Sure. If I had told you we were gonna do 20% revenue growth coming off 5%.
Unidentified speaker: I think people believed your target’s done
John, CEO, Payoneer: actually. We were show me story and we we outperformed even our own wildest expectations. Right.
Unidentified speaker: It it certainly was scenario.
John, CEO, Payoneer: And so the the confidence to deliver 15% growth in 2025, I I think investors should see how pragmatic we are, how frankly prescient we are about where the market is, and how how, where the growth is. And it’s driven by high single digit growth in marketplaces. We anticipate that. B2B growing 25%, coming off a 42% year and modest take rate expansion, which is, again, an underlying power in our franchise. We’ve diversified and are growing in Latin America and APAC.
These are our fastest growing markets. High B2B services markets, not goods. Know, our b to b business is 80 services for for only 20% goods, and they’re high take rate markets. And so when you see the the portfolio mix, the size of customer mix, the geography mix at Payoneer, our company is healthier and stronger than it’s ever been, and we’re expanding profitability. 3x growth in core business, profitability in 2025 was our guide, and you may ask about interest.
For those of you who are new to Payoneer, dollars eighty billion flowing through our platform and our customers are holding $7,000,000,000 of balances with Payoneer, up 9% year over year. And they hold them in within their Payoneer account because of the utility of our accounts payable franchise, our cards and our other tools. Right. And we pay no yield on that. And in fact, going from 2024 to 2025, we have a $40,000,000 revenue headwind Right.
From interest. But you know what we guided to for this year? Adjusted EBITDA flat year from ’24 to ’25 despite that $40,000,000 headwind. So core business adjusted EBITDA growing three x, core revenue growing 15% and adjusted EBITDA flat year to year despite a $40,000,000 headwind. We feel very good about the business and our guide.
Unidentified speaker: How is your confidence on your guide in terms of this year versus where you started off the year last year in terms of, you know, your ability to achieve or maybe even outperform it?
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. Our guidance philosophy is unchanged. We are pragmatic and prudent about our guide. We believe in the execution of our team. We communicated the data we saw in January, February is consistent with marketplace behavior overall and our guidance philosophy, and that’s what we’re seeing.
So how do I feel about our guide? I feel solid, confident, optimistic about the long term prospects we’re paying here. And think there’s we bought $137,000,000 of our stock back last year at $5.6 We feel good about where we are, and we see a lot of opportunity.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. John, obviously, the noise in the market around tariffs is important, especially for a company that has cross border aspects such as yours. And so I think 20% of your ICPs and about a third of your revenues are tied to China clients. So if you could just give us the latest update on your views on tariffs and migration efforts, maybe also just as an add on to that, if you could explain why b two b goods businesses may be more impacted by tariffs than it’s than your marketplace business. Yeah.
John, CEO, Payoneer: This is this is obviously on everybody’s minds. Right? Yeah. And there’s a there’s let’s acknowledge there’s uncertainty. I think we all feel it.
We see it. There’s uncertainty when you wake up and you turn on Bloomberg to know what what’s gonna happen. Yep. There’s a broad range of outcomes as it relates to Payoneer. Our business is strong, as I’ve communicated.
90 countries, diverse in terms of the corridors where that money is flowing between. It’s not just flowing US to China in our business. You know, when the company went public at $10 a share, 50% of our revenue came from China. Today, couple years later, it’s a third. And that diversification of our revenue makes us a stronger and stronger business while we’ve had that 42% growth I described.
2,000,000 active customers. The fastest growing markets are APAC in Latin America. China, as we’re talking about, as we think about tariffs, lot of volume, lowest take rate. So we are, you know, the sort of mantra inside of our office is profitable growth. Right.
So you drive profitable growth by adding more and more larger customers in higher take rate geographies. So we’re doing that. And at the end of the day, you know, having been at Alibaba for five years through the first Trump administration, having experienced tariffs, there is entrepreneurs, and particularly small ones, move fast, are resilient and are global. And when you when we talk to our customers around the world, modest tariff increases get absorbed in the supply chain. Right.
And, oh, you asked a question about b to b. Our b to b business, which had $2,500,000,000 2 point 7 billion dollars of volume in q four, which is our fastest growing franchise in the business with a massive addressable TAM, like in our like, right in the sweet spot, there’s a trillion dollars of volume. We are 80% services and 20% goods. So, you know, I feel good about the diversification of our customer base, the diversification of our geographies, our focus on high take rates. The uncertainty is distracting would be the right way, I guess, to say it, but it we’re powering through.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. So your perception is, it sounds like generally the Chinese seller is going to absorb the price of inflation effectively if there is or tariffs rather if there is, to the degree that the buyers are, you know, it is just gonna be part of the new norm effectively. Right? And then on the b to b side, a lot of it is services effectively, 80%.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. And and it it just it depends on the rate, but there but it’ll it’ll be trade is is the thesis of Paine. Right. Global cross border trade is the thesis. And the opportunity we are licensed globally, able to provide a trusted platform for sellers and services companies regardless of where they sleep, what government they live under.
We are able to provide a highly competitive solution for those customers, and I think we’ll be just fine. Okay.
Unidentified speaker: What are you seeing in ecom right now? You guys obviously have a great insight into ecom trends just given your position in the market. So maybe just give us a quick update on what the trends look like for ecom, especially on the marketplaces given how much you do with some of the biggest marketplaces Yeah. Around the world. And maybe it’s a 25% and just the runway for this kind of a you’ve seen about high single digit growth in ecom now for some time.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yes, we are it’s exactly what you just said. We have great visibility into the marketplace economies. And what we saw our performance on marketplaces really is tied to the performance of the marketplace themselves. Sure. Right?
Like if the seller wins the buy box and the consumer buys, Payoneer benefits. So in 2024, we had guided to high single digit growth, frankly, largely because of the information coming out of the marketplaces themselves. They outperformed and we took share. We outperformed and I think we did a little better than that just good because of our kick ass execution, frankly. Yeah.
In 2025, we’re guiding to high single digit growth. They’re normalizing
Unidentified speaker: back
John, CEO, Payoneer: to the sort of e com growth rates of marketplace. If you look over the last decade, marketplaces obviously had 30 some odd percent growth during COVID, that’s snapped back down, you know, to a more reasonable growth rate, 8% to 10 growth at marketplaces, I think is what we’ll see from them and consistent with what we saw at the end of q four and consistent with what we saw in January and February of this year.
Unidentified speaker: Okay. Very helpful. Could we go to the growth algorithm one more time? I mean, you guys, you know, like you said, 15% for this year and even 20% plus has been in the cards for you guys. And so when we think about the algorithm to stay at these rates, maybe just remind us again how much of that is coming from incremental onboarding of new customers and ICPs, your most valuable customers versus ARPU?
And just we’ve talked a lot about pricing in the past also with you guys and more opportunity. But just broadly speaking, how do you think about that algorithm in terms of getting there between
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. We we are, we’re sort of a factory. And the factory is ICP times ARPU minus cost to serve. Yeah. And ICP, our ideal customers is how we’ve clarified our thinking internally and helped have disclosures from for investors so that you can understand the power in our business.
So obviously, 2024 was a terrific year and everything working. You know, I said to my kids, everything we touched worked and the things we didn’t touch worked too. And that was sort of what powered the growth in the results in our business. Into 2025, we obviously had coming off of our best year in the company’s history, the comps are tougher, right, because we’re lapping our own kick ass performance. And in a macro environment, that’s more uncertain.
So guiding to 15% growth is pragmatic and prudent from my chair.
Unidentified speaker: Sure. Right.
John, CEO, Payoneer: And our formula, ICP times ARPU minus cost to serve, 2024, ’9 percent ICP growth, 21% ARPU growth and cost being flat drove our company’s performance. Our revenue and ARPU will grow faster than our customer adds or volume. And that’s important for folks to really understand and something we’ve communicated consistently. We talked about it at our September 2023 Investor Day that we’re adding higher value customers that are at the larger end of our ICP definition. When I first joined Payoneer and became CEO two years ago, we saw, oh, dollars 10,000 plus of accounts receivable into your Payoneer account, great profitability.
Our sales organization went out to add those customers. Three months later, they came back and said, we’re having success at $50,000 a month. And three months later, they came back and said, we’re having success at $250,000 a month. So our sales organization, which we have globally, on the ground in Lahore, on the ground in Manila, on the ground around the world, are focused on larger customers. So the absolute ICP count, a little bit feels like a relic
Unidentified speaker: Right.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Of of our of the formula that we put in place. And when we look at our customers, the largest customers have the best logo retention and net revenue retention. And so the confidence we have in the business we’re building is really rooted in data that suggests we’re solving a pain others don’t solve. We’re doing it in a very profitable and cost efficient way, and the unit economics of those customers are so good, that we look out across the multi year, more customer segmentation will come from Painter. Right?
Rather than blunt force size, you know, we’ve done the size definition. We’ve done some geographic definition. We’re moving towards industry and product portfolio bundling, as the financial stack gets broader. We acquired a workforce management company in August of twenty twenty four. That integration is going well.
As we move through the S and B P and L, what we want is you know, remember Jerry Maguire, we want all the money. Like, show me the money here. We want all the money, and and it’s all the AR and all the AP of cross border SMBs using our financial stack. So new products getting attached. I think we shared in Q4, ’50 ’3 percent of our customers use three or more AP products today.
In Q1 of twenty twenty two, that was 40%. So we’re attaching more products.
Unidentified speaker: Right.
John, CEO, Payoneer: We’re adding more valuable customers. We’re segmenting more even more efficiently in the organization. And and you mentioned pricing, right? We added $30,000,000 of incremental pricing in 2024. We have a guide to continue to do that because we’ve gone from a one size fits all pricing model to one that’s getting more and more bespoke.
And as it gets more bespoke by corridor, by geography, by SIC code, by bundle, we’re able to monetize our customers even better. So those 65,000 plus ICPs are moving to a relationship based pricing model. That gives us even more opportunity.
Unidentified speaker: Just in terms of ICPs, so maybe just for the audience and those on the webcast, just reminding people what the number of customers you have, the ICPs and then really the top of funnel. What are you doing to attract? Because you’re getting used to it always blows my mind at what is it? 300,000 applications per month, I think, for a new potential customer to come in and use your platform. It’s pretty Yeah.
John, CEO, Payoneer: It’s amazing to folks you’re sitting on whatever 4 Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. You know, if we were doing this event in The Philippines, Five Thousand people would come. Right? Pioneer is a powerful, meaningful brand to, you know, not to give a commercial for us, but it, like, there’s a lot of entrepreneurial ambition out out there in the world. Mhmm.
We’re the bridge between people’s ambition and their achievement because they can’t do business without us. Right. And they need a solution like ours. So as you said, we get three we get 11,000,000 applications a year. That’s a lot of entrepreneurial energy flying into the Payoneer platform saying, hey, I wanna be a business owner.
Well, some of those people are like my 20 year old daughter who are, you know, really smart, but have no revenue. Right? And she’s got AP but no AR, let’s just put it that way. And so we’re focused on using our data and our machine learning algorithms to identify, out of those 11,000,000 people who show up to Payoneer, the look alikes that look like our best ICPs. And we’re getting smarter and smarter at saying, oh, this person in this geography is a look alike to those.
Let’s get them on the phone in twelve hours with a with a salesperson, understand their needs and get them signed up and onboarded quickly. So the 11,000,000 in some ways is a vanity metric, you know, because it’s exciting, but I can’t monetize all those people, right? Like, I wanna focus on profitable growth, and profitable growth is not absolute numbers, although they’re fun to talk about. It’s actually optimizing that funnel to turn as much of that energy into into monetization for our shareholders. You know, 9% ICP growth oh, you you asked, I didn’t say.
2,000,000 active customers in every industry people in this room and around the world can understand trading, doing business with trading with other companies around the globe and using Payoneer as the financial guts, the financial stack of making that possible. I mean,
Unidentified speaker: the average growth was, what, 9% in 2024 for ICPs. But you’re obviously looking, as you mentioned, to really hone in on larger ICPs. Right? And so maybe just talk about that dynamic a little more and how you’re doing that and what you what you anticipate in terms of the growth
John, CEO, Payoneer: growth of the
Unidentified speaker: and the mix.
John, CEO, Payoneer: What we will see is revenue will grow faster than volume and ARPU will grow faster than ICP acquisition. And, you know, if I if I could wave I guess I could wave a magic wand. But the disclosure we would do would be more nuanced if we were started doing it over again, and we’re not gonna change it, but like it’s, you know, the disclosure might be more nuanced to segment those customers more. But you can see, in our B2B business, 25% growth in every region we did business in. Well, if you look at that with the ICP focus on larger ICPs and the size of the B2B opportunity, we are in a position to drive cross sell, more attachment of products and better pricing.
I haven’t talked about the card. We had 36% we have a for those of you who don’t know, in our AP stack, we have physical and virtual cards that our customers use, the physical card for their employees when they travel around the world to manage their expenses and the virtual cards for when they buy logistics or marketing or other they procure online. Well, our card business grew 36% in Q4 and had six straight quarters of 30 plus percent growth, which is awesome, right, because people are using Payoneer to manage their expenses. And the more they do that, the longer they stay Payoneer customers and the more money we make from them. Well, $80,000,000,000 of volume into the Payoneer account and 5 and a half spent on card.
So while I’m jumping up and down and I’m super excited about our card growth and all the businesses I talked to that are using it, we’re just at the beginning of the card journey. Right? Like, that card is a you know, I I shared with you at an earlier conversation, we’re seeing customers choose Payoneer just because of our card. I was talking to our salespeople in Dubai the other day and where there’s a lot of Middle East marketing services firms that choose Payoneer to manage the campaigns of all of their customers and they’re signing up for Payoneer for a card and our virtual cards, they’re taking funds from their old physical bank, putting them into their Payoneer account, so there’s no AR attached to them. So the addressable opportunity is not their sales, it’s their balance sheet.
And that’s pretty exciting. When we talk about TAM and Sam at Payoneer, we’re not talking about all the money they’re holding in their in their in their local bank. We’re just talking about their transactional volume. Yeah. So, we’re on the right side of selling a full financial stack to customers around the globe.
Unidentified speaker: I mean, you mentioned it, but look, look, I mean, obviously ARPU has been benefiting from the shift of customers using more and more products. Like you said, 53% of customers now using three plus products or services versus 40%, I think, in the early quarter twenty twenty two. But I mean, pricing has been such a big opportunity for you guys because you’ve been much more strategic about it in the last year or two. We’ve been excited about it. And I think you still, I mean, you talk about another, I think you had $30,000,000 of revenue benefit last year, another year this year of incremental $30,000,000 from pricing.
I mean, you have so much volume that’s intra network that’s really still not monetized, right? So just can you explain again what you still have on the horizon around pricing opportunities?
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. I think people should understand this as Payoneer had a one size fits all pricing model for decades. The team came in and we decided to pick some low hanging fruit two years ago and start identifying pricing opportunities that were easy. If Pay and your colleagues are listening, I know your work isn’t easy, but was easier to achieve. And that was based on size, based on geography, some pricing.
We now have product specific pricing opportunities. You reference our intra network flows. For those of you who are new to Payoneer, dollars 80,000,000,000 of volume flowing into the platform does not include 10 plus billion dollars of volume moving between Payoneer account holders. So if Darren has a Payoneer account and he’s in Argentina and I have a Payoneer account and I’m in Colombia, I can make a payment to him, sort of Venmo him, for lack of a better way of thinking about it, between one account and another. And we’ve just begun charging for that cross border volumes.
Right? The domestic to domestic was sort of a treasury function. We’re doing less charging, but between countries, that is a cross border volume, and we’re beginning to look at ways to monetize them. We started to, and some of it actually uncovers the internal networks in our business. So let’s picture a customer.
There’s a real story. A woman who’s an entrepreneur here in The United States in Texas provides outsourced billing services to dental offices across the Southeast and Southwest. I I think she has 500 or so dental offices. She hires contractors in Latin America to do the billing. She then gets paid into her Payoneer account from those those, doctors offices, those dentists.
She makes payments to her contractors who are across Latin America, and those folks then use their card when they take business trips up to The United States for their annual event and conferences. So the money flows into the platform, moves through the platform, and then is spent on a Payoneer card. That there isn’t a financial services provider she could go to that would be as easy to use, as mobile friendly, you know, as frankly, I think focused on her with the service that we offer and paying her.
Unidentified speaker: That’s great. I mean, it seems like that’s still one example of an opportunity, but there’s so many pricing opportunities throughout the business still. Guys, just in interest of time, I’m gonna probably turn it to the audience for questions. But, John, I mean, when we think about capital allocation as folks are thinking about it, any updated thoughts around capital allocation this year, M and A maybe? I mean, just how do you think about using our balance sheet in any way?
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. We have 400 and just about just under $500,000,000,000 of cash on our balance sheet, and we generate a lot of cash. So this is a healthy cash producing company. We our M and A, we’ve done three transactions in the last twenty four months, all sub 100,000,000 We are a tuck in acquirer to add capability. We bought a workforce management company headquartered in Singapore last year to help us with our expansion of the financial stack with contractor and global employee management.
That’s going well. The integration’s on pace, and it’s part of the evolution of what we offer. We will, we’ve communicated, we’ve, have passed all the regulatory approvals to acquire a licensed business in China, which will expand our licensing framework in the first half of this year, which when the company went public a number of years ago, was probably the number one risk factor on the minds of investors was China and licenses. And China is a smaller share of our total, and we will be licensed in China, which is great. We’ve been operating, but it’ll be nice to have that.
We’ll be one of three firms, Western firms with that license, which is, I think, a powerful asset for us. In terms of future acquisitions, we see opportunities in spend management, the software that businesses use to track their expenses. And my view is from a build, buy, and partner perspective, buy things when they have proven product market fit, where they have sort of worked the P and L kinks out, so they’re not losing a lot of money, but they have not unlocked distribution. Because Payoneer has powerful customer acquisition dynamics and great distribution, so we can attach more products to our customers. We’ve proven it.
We’re seeing ourselves do it. So we can keep selling more products to our customers, which will drive increased retention and better ARPU. You and I have talked about this in the past. When I worked at Alibaba, we saw we had 187,000 customers when I got there paying us $5,000 And four years later, we had 217,000 customers paying us $15,000 We went from $880,000,000 in revenue to $3,500,000,000 from $200,000,000 of EBITDA to $800,000,000 of EBITDA. SMBs globally want one stop shop, trust and a simple way to do business.
And if your value exceeds your price, you can push a lot through that pipe, and that’s what we’re doing.
Unidentified speaker: Let me take questions. John, you had your stock had a great year last year, and then obviously, the whole market has pulled back and now concerned around tariffs. So what about buybacks? I mean, you’re obviously talking about M and A, but you did some buybacks last year. What are your thoughts now?
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. We bought $137,000,000 of stock last year at $5.6 We’re authorized and continuing to buy. I I am a believer in what we’re doing.
Unidentified speaker: Sounds pretty you sound pretty confident.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. We, you know, we look, there’s uncertainty in the market. So I don’t wanna say it’s like, you know, it hasn’t been the easiest thirty days, you know, it has but when what we talk about
Unidentified speaker: That’s a market stand. Yeah.
John, CEO, Payoneer: What you’re saying for
Unidentified speaker: not the company.
John, CEO, Payoneer: Our customers want what we have. Our team is qualified and capable to deliver it, and our brand is unlike any other.
Unidentified speaker: Questions?
Unidentified speaker: Hi, John. Thanks. I wanted to ask a bit about, the opportunities in terms of marketplace penetration. Are there any meaningful marketplaces, newer marketplaces where Payoneer maybe doesn’t have a connection and still has opportunities on that side of the network?
John, CEO, Payoneer: Yeah. It’s a great question. The world’s marketplaces, the western marketplaces, we have exceptional relationships with. The emerging marketplaces, TEMU, Sheehan, TikTok and others, are opportunities that we continue to work to penetrate and take and provide service and value to. There’s innovative I think, and this is me sharing my internal view of this, I think some of those Western marketplaces will spend real energy in the emerging markets as they seek to unlock additional growth for themselves.
And that is a genuine opportunity for Payoneer over the decade, we’ll call it. Because if I was if I was sitting at one of those marketplaces seeing slower slow you know, normalized growth in the West, but the consumption economy and the rise of the middle class in emerging markets is growing, that’s what powers marketplace growth, and the access to high quality, low cost products is what people want. So I think that that will be an area of opportunity. Our marketplace team, which is actually headquartered here, has KPIs and goals all around penetration, acquisition, onboarding, relationships with additional partners. We love those relationships.
They’re really important to us. We cultivate them and nurture them, and we think there’s an opportunity for more growth there.
Unidentified speaker: Great. Guys, thank you
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