Image source: VeriFone Systems.

What happened

Shares of Verifone Systems, Inc. were down 19.1% as of 11:30 a.m. ET Wednesday after the payments and commerce solutions company announced weaker-than-expected fiscal third-quarter 2016 revenue.

So what

Adjusted quarterly revenue fell 3.4% year over year, to $493 million, and translated to a 10.6% decline in adjusted net income per diluted share, to $0.42. By comparison, Verifone's guidance provided three months ago called for significantly higher adjusted revenue of $515.4 million, and adjusted net income of $0.40 per share.

Verifone CEO Paul Galant explained:

We made real progress during the third quarter in further repositioning Verifone, building our services business and bringing our new devices to market. Despite this progress, Q3 was a challenging quarter for Verifone on revenues. We moved decisively to reduce our cost structure, and those initial efforts helped us exceed our revised EPS target. We are managing through what we believe are difficult but temporary local market and lingering EMV adoption issues.

Now what

For the current (fiscal fourth) quarter, Verifone anticipates adjusted revenue of $460 million, and adjusted net income per share in the range of $0.28 to $0.29. Analysts, on average, were modeling higher fiscal Q4 adjusted revenue of $536.3 million, and adjusted earnings of $0.50 per share.

Finally, for the full fiscal year, Verifone now expects adjusted revenue of $2.0 billion, and adjusted net income per share of $1.64 to $1.65. Both ranges mark reductions from its previous guidance, which was reduced last quarter to predict fiscal 2016 revenue of $2.1 billion, and earnings of $1.85 per share.

That said, Galant also insisted the company is "relentlessly executing the long-term vision for Verifone to transform from a box shipper to a services provider." But after combining its relative underperformance so far with yet another full-year guidance reduction, it's no surprise investors are taking another big step back from Verifone today.