Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Klarna has filed for an initial public offering in the US as the Swedish buy now, pay later group presses ahead with its highly anticipated listing despite volatile market conditions.
The fintech, which confidentially filed for a listing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in November, said on Friday that it had applied to the regulator to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KLAR.
The listing would be a significant boost to the subdued IPO market and could value Klarna at as much as $15bn. The listing will be closely watched by fintech investors hoping that the sector can emerge from a funding drought driven by higher interest rates.
Klarna said on Friday that it had returned to profit in 2024. It reported a net profit of $21mn, against a loss of $244mn the previous year. Revenues rose almost 24 per cent to $2.81bn.
The group became a symbol of the fintech boom and bust cycle when its valuation crashed from $46bn in 2021, a pricetag that made it Europe’s most valuable start-up, to $6.7bn just a year later.
Its public filing comes as US stocks have fallen sharply on rising investor concerns that President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade agenda will slow the world’s largest economy. The filing keeps the group on course for an IPO by April.
More than $4tn has been erased from the value of the blue-chip S&P 500 since the index hit a record high on February 19, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down 11 per cent over the same period. European stocks, in contrast, have enjoyed a strong start to the year.
US consumer discretionary stocks, which perform well when the growth outlook is good, have performed particularly poorly as recession fears have grown.
Shares in Affirm, a rival buy now, pay later company, have tumbled almost 40 per cent over the past month. BNPL services are particularly popular among financially vulnerable consumers, according to research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Rising volatility and plunging share prices have so far weighed on the broader IPO market, which many bankers had tipped to roar back to life under Trump after a three-year drought.
Data centre operator CoreWeave is preparing to file for an IPO that would value the company at more than $35bn, in what is likely to prove a significant test for a market reeling from Trump’s erratic tariff announcements.
Klarna was founded in 2005 by chief executive Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who was embroiled in a boardroom dispute caused by a rift between him and his co-founder Victor Jacobsson last year. The power struggle ended with Jacobsson’s representative being ousted from Klarna’s board in October.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley will act as joint book runners for the IPO.
