MasterCard earnings up in first quarter

MANILA, Philippines - MasterCard has registered a 20.1-percent growth in gross dollar volume (GDV), 21.6 percent in purchase volume, 16.5 percent in purchase transactions, 18.8 percent in cash transactions, and 10.9 percent in cards issued versus the same period in 2010. That covers the Asia/Pacific, Middle East & Africa (APMEA) region.

As of end-March, 303 million MasterCard cards (excluding Maestro and Cirrus) had been issued by MasterCard customer financial institutions across APMEA. Cardholders in the region made 1,296 million purchase transactions in the first quarter of 2011 and could use their MasterCard cards at 32.2 million acceptance locations worldwide.

At the end of the first quarter, the Maestro brand mark appeared on 218 million cards in APMEA. Consumers can now make debit point of sale purchases with their Maestro-branded cards at 1.9 million merchant locations in the APMEA region.

MasterCard Worldwide Asia/Pacific, Middle East & Africa president Vicky Bindra said that the first quarter results reflected solid gains in the areas of credit, debit and commercial cards.

“As MasterCard continues to look for ways to replace cash, we will work closely with our bank, merchant and other payment partners to leverage new technologies and innovative payment methods that effectively meet the payment needs of consumers,” Bindra added.

In addition to the performance highlights, MasterCard in the APMEA region also reported a number of significant achievements for the same period.

In 2010, MasterCard Worldwide reported $2.7 trillion in gross dollar volume on its products by consumers around the world. Powered by the MasterCard Worldwide Network – the fastest payment processing network in the world – MasterCard processes over 23 billion transactions each year and has the capacity to handle 160 million transactions per hour, with an average network response time of 130 milliseconds and with 99.99 percent reliability.