Quick overview

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PayPal announced that Enrique Lores will succeed Alex Chriss as CEO. Chriss’s turnaround plan failed to meet goals and streamline the vast payments company.

The shares fell as much as 19 percent, the largest intraday decline in over four years, following the CEO’s announcement and a separate statement revealing that fourth-quarter profit and revenue missed analysts’ projections.

When Chriss was chosen to succeed longtime CEO Dan Schulman in 2023, committed to putting profit first while refocusing the company on PayPal’s branded checkout experience.

However, because Chriss failed to meet the new targets after raising earnings guidance twice, the stock has lagged behind competitors. On Tuesday, executives stated that they were unable to stick to their earlier projections for the upcoming year.

Evercore ISI analyst Adam Frisch stated that the timing of PayPal’s management changes “was probably a bit sooner than most were expecting.”

The key question is whether he will start looking at options for strategic assets or assemble a strong payments team to try yet another multiyear turnaround. Loro spent decades at HP, rising from an engineering internship to positions such as managing HP’s printing division and the office that oversaw the company’s 2015 split from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Most recently, Lores has been leading HP through more general industry challenges, such as the unpredictability of US tariffs and the decline in consumer and corporate computer demand. Under Lores, HP had been moving its global supply chain away from China and toward Vietnam, Thailand, India, Mexico, and the United States.

Tariffs threatened to derail the long-struggling personal computer market, which had started to recover last year.