How Visa Spent $14 Billion in 12 Months

It pays to be a credit card company; Visa's operating margins over the last 12 months were 3.8 times wider than the typical large cap stock. Image credit: iStock/Thinkstock.

While consumers may not be charging as much on their credit cards today as they did before the financial crisis, Visa continues to rake in the dough. Over the last 12 months, it earned $14 billion in revenue, ranking 176th among S&P 500 companies. What does the 57-year-old company do with all this money? The slideshow below provides an answer.

Viewers of the slideshow will learn two interesting points, among other things, from scrolling through it:

First, Visa has incredibly wide profit margins. Its operating margin over the past 12 months was 65%. That's 3.8 times wider than the typical large cap stock.
Second, since going public in 2008, Visa's shares have outperformed the S&P 500 by approximately 400 percentage points.

What else can investors learn about Visa from an analysis of its revenue flows? Scroll through the brief slideshow below to find out.

All slideshow data sourced from YCharts.com on Dec. 2, 2015. Slideshow image credits: istock/Thinkstock.

The article How Visa Spent $14 Billion in 12 Months originally appeared on Fool.com.

John Maxfield has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Visa. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.