New York: Klarna Group Plc has filed publicly for a US initial public offering (IPO) in what could be one of the year’s biggest financial company listings.
The Stockholm-founded digital-payments company’s revenue climbed 24% last year.
Klarna had net income of US$21mil on revenue of US$2.81bil last year, compared with a net loss of US$244mil on revenue of US$2.28bil a year earlier, according to its filing last Friday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Klarna filed confidentially for the IPO in November.
Klarna is seeking to raise at least US$1bil in the IPO and is targeting a valuation of more than US$15bil in the listing, Bloomberg News reported.
The company and some of its shareholders are selling shares in the offering, the filing shows.
The listing comes as Wall Street weighs up the potential impact of recent market swings on a group of large companies seeking to list in the United States, including artificial intelligence (AI) cloud computing provider CoreWeave Inc and medical supplies maker Medline Inc.
Klarna offers consumers so-called buy now, pay later financing, a type of lending that took off at the start of the decade and further accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic with the explosion of online shopping.
Analysts pegged the company’s valuation in October at about US$14.6bil.
That’s an improvement from the US$6.7bil value it achieved in a 2022 private funding round, but a far cry from the US$45.6bil valuation it had in 2021 during the height of the fintech boom.
Klarna has 93 million active consumers and works with more than 675,000 merchants, the filing shows.
Klarna spent much of the past year refocusing ahead of the planned IPO – setting up a new British holding company, shedding businesses, focusing on payment partners and investing in AI.
The company agreed in June to divest its Checkout payments business for about US$520mil, and in August snapped up the assets of New Zealand’s Laybuy.
Klarna has bolstered its relationships with tech stalwarts, announcing in November it would offer buy-now, pay-later credit to US shoppers using Google Pay just a month after sealing a partnership with Apple Inc.
The Swedish firm has also struck deals with Adyen NV, Xero Ltd and Worldpay Inc as it looks for growth via mainstream payment processors.
The company’s largest investors include entities affiliated with Sequoia Capital, which beneficially owns 78.8 million shares ahead of the offering, the filing shows. — Bloomberg
