Visa Inc (NYSE: V) stock rose over 1.8% on 25th October, 2018 (as of 9:58 AM GMT-4 ; Source: Google finance) post fourth quarter of 2018 update. The company has returned approximately $2.1 billion of capital to shareholders in the quarter, consisting of $1.6 billion of share repurchases and $500 million through dividends. The board of directors increased the Company’s quarterly cash dividend by 19% to $0.25 per share.
During FY 18, the global leading network connecting issuers and merchants got stronger on a number of dimensions. The number of cards including virtual cards increased by about 80 million (ph) to 3.3 billion (ph). Total Visa volume surpassed a record $11 trillion driven by 182 billion (ph) transactions or an average of 500 million (ph) transactions every single day during fiscal 2018. Payments volume totaled over 8.2 trillion (ph), increasing by almost $900 billion year-over-year. The company’s payments volume growth was strong across the globe with double-digit growth in constant dollars in all regions except Europe which grew at 9.2%. And with the payments volume growing twice as fast as global PCE, Visa’s penetration of global purchase PCE increased by half a point to over 16% this year. Transactions processed totaled $124 billion, up 12% lifting the processing penetration by one point globally.
V in the fourth quarter of FY 18 has reported the adjusted earnings per share of $1.21, beating the analysts’ estimates for the adjusted earnings per share of $1.20. The company had reported the adjusted revenue growth of 35.9 percent to $5.43 billion in the fourth quarter of FY 18, beating the analysts’ estimates for revenue of $5.44 billion. Processed transaction growth was consistent with last quarter at 12%. Expense growth adjusted for a donation of available for sale, investment securities to the Visa Foundation was 12%, primarily driven by personnel-related investments.
During the fourth quarter, the company beginning to have more success with FinTechs both in terms of signings but also agreement still to be contracted. The company has signed agreements this quarter with Revolut, JAJA in the UK, Solaris in Germany and G2A in Central Eastern Europe. Q4 was an active quarter for deal renewals and wins across the Asia. A few examples include NTUC FairPrice co-brand which is Singapore’s largest supermarket chain. The Mall Group co-brand one of Thailand’s largest retailers and the AirAsia cobrand in Malaysia. In New Zealand, Kiwibank selected Visa as its long-term exclusive partner for all its payments products, which brings the company to four of the Top-5 issuers now exclusive long-term Visa partners in that market.