The fintech company made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
Swedish buy-payment company Klarna made its highly anticipated public debut this year on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Klarna sold 34.3 million shares to investors at $40 per share late Tuesday, and was listed on the exchange on Wednesday. This exceeds the forecast range of $35 to $37 per share, valuing the company at over $15 billion.
Recommended Stories
List of 4 itemsEnd of the list
Klarna’s shares surpassed the offer price by 30% in its NYSE debut on Wednesday, giving Swedish Fintech a $19.65 billion valuation.
According to the Renaissance capital, the amount raised for around $1.37 billion in Kralna’s first public offer is the biggest IPO of the year. It’s worth noting, as 2025 is one of the busy years for companies that are publicly available.
Other IPOs this year include Figma and Circle Internet Group, the design software companies that publish USDC Stablecoin. Investors are also looking forward to the expected market debut of ticket exchange StubHub and Cryptocurrency Exchange Gemini.
Founded in 2005 as a payment company, Klarna joined the US buy-on-wage market in 2015 in partnership with department store operator Macy’s. Since then, Klarna has expanded to hundreds of thousands of merchants, embedded in internet browsers and digital wallets as a credit card alternative. The company recently announced a partnership with Walmart.
Klarna will be exchanged under the symbol “Klar”. The company was founded in Sweden and is a popular payment service in Europe, but executives of the company said it has decided to make it public in the US as a signal that Klarna’s future growth opportunities lie in US shoppers.
“This is the world’s largest consumer market and the world’s largest credit card market. From our perspective, it’s a huge opportunity,” CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in an interview with the Associated Press before the IPO.
Over the years, in multiple interviews, Siemiatkowski reveals that Klarna is trying to steal customers from large credit card companies, viewing it as a high-profit, exploitative product that consumers rarely use correctly.
Purchase in installments
Klarna’s most popular product is what is known as the “Pay-in-4” plan. The plan allows customers to split their purchases into four payments over six weeks. The company also offers long-term payment plans that charge interest. The business model is globally caught up in particular among consumers who are reluctant to use credit cards. The company said 111 million consumers around the world use Klarna.
Public interest has been growing in recent years as Klarna and other hoarding companies are aware of their business models. State and federal regulators, as well as consumer groups, have expressed some concern that they could overexpand themselves financially with wage payment loans that consumers are purchasing as much as credit cards.
According to Siemiatkowski, the company is actively monitoring how consumers use their products, with Klarna users having an average balance of less than $100. As the company issues loans within six weeks, Klarna claims it can more easily adjust its underwriting criteria depending on the economic situation.
Klarna reported second-quarter revenue of $823 million in August before it made public, saying it had an adjusted profit of $29 million. Klarna’s Pay-in-4 loans have a delinquency rate of 0.89%, and for longer-term loans for larger purchases, the delinquency rate is 2.23%. These figures are below the average 30-day late payment rate for credit cards.
Klarna will become the second-largest purchase paying company due to the market capitalization behind Affirm. AFFIRM’s stock has soared more than 40% so far this year, with the US-based company valued at around $28 billion, and it believes it could potentially take market share from traditional banks and credit cards, aided by beliefs among investors. The assertion fell slightly on Wednesday.
The main underwriters for Klarna’s IPO were JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
