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Earnings Calls: 
MasterCard First Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Albena Toncheva
123jump.com
Last Update: 6:48 AM EDT May 04 2007


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The leading payment solutions firm reported revenue of $915 million, up 23.9% over last year due to the currency fluctuation of the euro relative to US dollar and the restructuring of pricing, mainly on cross border transactions. During the quarter, gross dollar volume grew 19.1% to $509 billion. In its PayPass initiative, MasterCard currently has over 14 million cards and devices, which can be used at over 51,000 merchant locations worldwide.


Investors Question and Answers

 
Sequential Earnings Growth | Quarterly Earnings by Year | Quarterly Earnings Growth by Year

Source: Company filings    Q1:March  Q2:June  Q3:September  Q4:December
 
Chris McWilton: The firm is going to try to maximize the margin. There are long term executive objectives out there. Obviously this quarter was very strong through the margin. There is a lot of scale in this business. If the firm can keep its costs under control, grow the revenue, even if you take out the currency and cross borders piece, you can see the scalability. The first quarter tends to get high margin and towards the end of the year when the firm is heavily into advertising and promotion, having rebates on the yield, revenue comes down. Certainly do not extrapolate this yield for the rest of this year. The management cannot predict long-term objectives, but it is certainly off to a great start.

Moshe Katri: Are you seeing any signs that there is anything different in terms of economic activity out there?

Chris McWilton: That is a broad question around the world. The revenue, the volume growths were very strong and it is too early to tell whether any sub prime fallout is going to impact and ripple through the US economy. But things still appear to be very strong. You have seen the earnings reports coming out in the past few weeks. The markets seem to be thinking that the economy is resilient to a lot of this. The firm is not seeing anything here and that would signal broad-based economic distress.

Christopher Brendler: Can you talk at all about the difference between margins and revenues on the debit versus credit and even more importantly international versus US?

Chris McWilton: You had to breakdown debit into two forms of debit. There is signature and there is PIN. The signature-based transactions are processed in credit rails and they carry the same pricing than a credit transaction. A PIN-based debit is not as profitable to the firm as signature-based, but if you do look at the operational statistics and the growth in the US in particular, the firm is getting a lot of traction there and seeing some of the success of that part of the portfolio conversion. International volume is great for the firm, if somebody crosses the border, it can’t be processed on the domestic scheme. It got to be processed in its networks and therefore it is getting not only the processing charge but it is getting the currency conversion charge regardless of whether or not it converts the currency. International volume drives this business.

Matthew Park: How far do you think you have gotten in terms of differentiating MasterCard in terms of what solutions you are providing and what feedback you are getting from your card issuers?

Chris McWilton: The firm’s customers seem to be happy because they’re getting a lot of business. The firm spends a lot of time on customer focus strategy making sure it has people in place that can be impactful to a customer’s business to understand brand and they understand processing. They understand how to increase activation rates on a card, advisory capabilities, how to help them make money. The firm is not just walking in with a price sheet to a customer saying it can beat its competitors, but it is walking with the approach that says how can it help the customer to make more money. The firm made a difference there and you will see the difference relative to one of its competitors going forward.
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