Asian markets have proven difficult for PayPal to crack over the last decade. Notwithstanding its continued market dominance elsewhere in the world, domestic markets in countries including India and China have been resistant to the company’s popular digital payment services.
Now, the company is certain: as of 2022, that sluggishness is a thing of the past. This confidence is backed by PayPal’s latest growth strategy, through which the company aims to invest and acquire its way to $50 billion in revenue by 2025—more than doubling its 2020 revenue.
Explaining that PayPal is looking to recast itself as an “enabler” rather than a “disruptor,” PayPal Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman said that to reach this aspirational benchmark, the company will need to integrate more subtly into Asian markets. For cash-driven economies in Japan and elsewhere, this will mean reaching out to names that domestic consumers already trust.
Representative of this strategy is PayPal’s 2021 acquisition of Japanese domestic BNPL startup Paidy for $2.7 billion. “A lot of incremental resource and potential incremental acquisitions inside of Japan will really be the focus of our activity there,” Schulman said, adding that synergy with existing brands and financial institutions will assist PayPal in breaking out of the purely cross-border remittance box it has found itself in throughout the continent.
