Visa Slides After Revenue at Payments Giant Misses Estimates

(Bloomberg) — Visa Inc. slipped in late trading Tuesday after reporting quarterly revenue that just missed Wall Street estimates — a rarity for the world’s biggest payments network.

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Shares of San Francisco-based Visa declined 3.2% to $256.39 at 8 p.m. in New York.

Net revenue for the fiscal third quarter ended June 30 was $8.9 billion, Visa said Tuesday in a statement. That was about $60 million — or 0.6% — shy of the average estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Visa last missed analysts’ revenue estimates by an even narrower margin in 2020, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Adjusted net income for the fiscal third quarter rose 9% to $4.9 billion, or $2.42 a share, missing Wall Street’s prediction of $2.43.

Worldwide card spending climbed 4.9% from a year earlier. In the US, where Visa gets roughly 40% of its revenue, spending advanced 5.1%. US retail sales, excluding motor vehicles, rose last month by the most in three months, a sign that the economy is still holding up as the Federal Reserve gets closer to cutting interest rates.

Last month, a federal judge rejected a $30 billion settlement that Visa and rival Mastercard Inc. had reached earlier in the year with US merchants in an attempt to resolve two decades of litigation over credit-swipe fees.

US District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn wrote that the accord would have “disproportionately and inequitably” benefited small, local merchants over larger companies such as Walmart Inc. and Target Corp., and that Visa and Mastercard appear capable of swallowing a “substantially” costlier deal.

(Updates stock reaction in second paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the adjusted earnings per share figure.)