The main Irish arm of online payments company PayPal saw an increase in pretax profit to €16.8 million, despite a fall in revenue.
Accounts filed for PayPal Service Europe Ltd showed revenue for the year ended December 31st, 2024, was €193.1 million, down from €203 million a year earlier.
In a note on the accounts, the directors said the lower revenue was to a reduction in employee-related expenses as staff numbers fell, with a related decrease in cost plus remuneration based on these expenses.
Administrative expenses were slashed from €212.1 million to €181.1 million.
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That left it with operating profit of €13.6 million, compared with a loss of more than €7.1 million in 2023. The company recorded a pretax loss of more than €5 million that year.
PayPal reduced staff costs during the year, despite taking a €17.7 million charge for redundancies. The wage bill fell from €113.3 million in 2023 to €104.1 million last year.
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Total staff costs, including pensions, share-based payments and redundancy costs, were €160.6 million for the year, down from €171.6 million a year earlier. The share-based payments cost the company €23 million in 2024, down from €38 million a year earlier.
The number of people employed at the company fell from 1,830 at the end of 2023 to 1,598 at the end of December 2024.
The company cut a number of jobs from its Irish workforce in 2024, reducing it by almost 300 over two tranches of announcements as part of what it described as a global effort to “right size” the company. That came after cuts in 2023, when the company reduced its global workforce by 7 per cent, including a number of job cuts in Dublin and Co Louth.
The company also said it would close an office in Dundalk as part of the cost-cutting plan, sell its Ballycoolin offices and move to a smaller premises that could accommodate staff from both Dublin and Dundalk.
Despite that, the payments company has added its operations in Ireland, promising to create up 100 jobs at a new artificial intelligence (AI) fraud and data science centre here. The payments company said in June it was hiring across AI engineering, data science, software development, risk modelling and cybersecurity.
The Irish operation, which was originally set up as a customer service hub, is now being developed as a centre for innovation, with the Irish team expected to play a key role in PayPal’s global network of innovation hubs.
