As we near the end of the year and simultaneously the end of the earnings reporting in the last 3 months of the year, one company that is highly associated with the retail industry reported their earnings on Tuesday, December 12, 2017, after the market closed for trading.

The company, VeriFone Systems (PAY), reported their fiscal fourth-quarter net income at +$3.1 million dollars, completely reversing a loss in the same period a year ago. Earnings after adjustments came in at $0.44 per share which beat the estimates of $0.43 per share analysts had been expecting.

This was the one bright spot in the earnings report- that they beat the earnings per share number. However, looking forward,  the company expects revenue to come in at about $418 million dollars whereas analysts were expecting estimates of much higher revenues in the $462 million-dollar range.

This aspect of the earnings report is what caused the sell-off after the numbers were released.  Shares which closed the day up $0.28 at $18.47, ended up closing down 7.42% at $17.10 as of 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Some History On The Company

-Verifone was founded by William “Bill” Melton and incorporated in Hawaii in 1981, and named itself after its first product, the name standing for Verification telephone.

-Since the late 1980s, Verifone has held more than 60 percent of the U.S. market, and during the 1990s the company captured more than half of the international market for such systems

-Verifone went public in March 1990, raising more than $54 million

-Its principal product lines have included point-of-sale, merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems for multiple industries, notably financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare markets. It provides countertop electronic payment terminals that accept card payment options Mobile payment,[43][44] chip and PIN, and Contactless payment,[45] including Near field communication (NFC)[46][47] as well as support Credit and Debit cards, EBT cards, EMV, and other PIN-based transactions; an array of software applications and application libraries; and portable solutions that support 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth, and WiFi technologies.

source: Wikipedia

PAY Technicals

(Click on image to enlarge)

The above price chart shows the intra-day price action on the left and the after-hours session action on the right-each on the 5 minute time frame in both instances. It is clearly evident on the right half of the charts, to see exactly when the earnings announcement became public and the shares sold off fairly hard in that first five-minute red bar candle.