Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

seydor

Paypal transacted 1.3T in 2022. Paypal's market cap is 69B, apple 2960B

View on HN

Given the context, you would then want to look at value extraction.

How much is each entity extracting from the suggested economy in terms of income.

PayPal operating income: $4 billion

Apple operating income: $114 billion

And of course PayPal is a skimmer, somewhat similar to Visa, so their extraction is miniscule compared to the transaction base. Apple carves out a fat profit from their ecosystem by comparison.

Maybe PayPal is beaten down here and their stock is relatively cheap as a value play. Or maybe they're about to be destroyed as the US switches to a European style, low cost insta money moving system courtesy of FedNow, and the market is pricing it accordingly. PayPal better diversify in a hurry, the transaction skimming business isn't going to be so nice in the future.

But this is a bit of a risk, isn't it? It means that there is a huge margin in anyone who could disintermediate Apple, and an incentive for other parties to encourage that. And clear evidence of some kind of monopoly rent -- how are they sustaining a ~30% margin when PayPal's is a fraction of a percent, unless they have a monopoly that should be subject to antitrust action?

They presumably justify the 30% to regulators by saying they host the store, provide the tools, etc etc.

Isn't that just admitting to exactly the sort of tying that antitrust is supposed to protect the public from? If you want to distribute your app (the thing they restrict anyone else from doing), you have to pay for their store hosting and tools etc. etc.

Meanwhile you have Epic offering to do the whole shebang for 10%, F-Droid doing it on Android for free apps for nothing, PayPal doing payment processing for a fraction of a percent over the credit card fees whereas Apple still wants 30% from in-app purchases that don't even use their hosting or tools. Makes it pretty clear that 30% is the monopolist lock-in price and not the free market price.

Doesn't the presence of competitors indicate that it's not monopolistic lock-in? If Apple didn't exist and Epic is 10%, would that be monopolistic lock-in compared to f-droid doing it free? Is the presence of anything free in any an indication that everything else is monopolistic lock-in?

Is apple going to ban direct FedNow transactions between users and developers? Do they ban cash payments currently?

Are you saying the amount of transactions processed should dictate market value?

pointing out how little it matters to apple

That is all paypal does. Apple does a couple of other things.

This is a non point?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com