Global Payments Provides Business Update Related to COVID-19

Global Payments Inc. (NYSE: GPN), a leading worldwide provider of payment technology and software solutions, today provided a business update as the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to evolve.

Global Payments is closely monitoring the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak and our top priority is to ensure the health and safety of our team members, customers, partners and the communities in which we live and work. We have taken numerous actions to safeguard our team members, including encouraging work from home, implementing precautionary measures in our offices, temporarily closing facilities, restricting business travel and providing mandatory training to educate all employees about COVID-19.

Global Payments began implementing business continuity plans in impacted areas in early 2020 and has continued to expand these efforts to all regions globally. The company is operating normally, and we do not currently anticipate any significant operational impacts. The company’s first quarter performance in January, February and through the first two weeks of March exceeded our internal expectations, excluding approximately $15 million of adjusted net revenue impact from COVID-19 in our Asia Pacific region. However, starting in mid-March COVID-19 began to impact the company’s results significantly in North America and Europe as governments took actions to encourage social distancing and implement shelter in place directives. The deterioration accelerated toward the end of March as the pandemic spread further and the number of countries and localities adopting restrictive measures meaningfully increased.

As a result, we now expect adjusted net revenue for the first quarter to be up slightly on a combined basis and adjusted earnings per share to grow approximately mid-teens compared to the prior year on a constant currency basis. These results exclude recent adverse foreign currency exchange rate movements, which we currently estimate had up to a 100 basis point impact on adjusted net revenue and adjusted earnings per share for the period. We expect the year-over-year GAAP revenue and GAAP earnings per share trends for the first quarter to be roughly consistent with the fourth quarter of 2019.