PayPal rival Adyen surges 90 percent in IPO with valuation topping $15 billion

  • The Dutch firm is not issuing new shares. Instead, its shareholders are selling their stock, which amounts to 13.4 percent of outstanding shares, to institutional investors.
  • On Tuesday, Adyen priced its shares at 240 euros ($281.6), which was at the upper end of the range the company had previously indicated.

Shares of Dutch fintech firm and PayPal rival Adyen surged nearly 90 percent on their first day of trade Wednesday in Amsterdam, in what is one of Europe's biggest technology initial public offerings (IPO) in recent times.

On Tuesday, Adyen priced its shares at 240 euros ($281.6), which was at the upper end of the range the company had previously indicated in its prospectus. This gave the company a market capitalization or valuation of 7.1 billion euros ($8.3 billion).

But shares opened at 400 euro, marking a 66 percent rise from the 240 euro pricing. Shares finished the day up nearly 90 percent at 455 euros, giving the company a valuation of 13.4 billion euros or ($15.8 billion).

The Dutch firm is not issuing new shares. Instead, its shareholders are selling their stock, which amounts to 13.4 percent of outstanding shares, to institutional investors.

Adyen is a payments processing firm that works with customers including Netflix, Facebook and Spotify. It also sells points of sales systems for physical stores and handles payments online and in-store. Adyen processed payment volumes of 108 billion euros ($127 billion) in 2017, up from 66 billion euros the year before, representing 63 percent growth. And this has been growing strongly each year.

The 12-year-old company has been profitable for some time. It recorded a net income of 71.3 million euros in 2017, though this was down from 97.2 million the year before. Revenues exceeded 1 billion euros for the first time in 2017.

Pieter van der Does, chief executive officer of Adyen.
Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Pieter van der Does, chief executive officer of Adyen.

"I'm very proud to be building this company with such a great team. This listing will only help us to continue to do what we are doing now: helping our merchants grow and reshaping the payments industry," Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does said in a statement on Tuesday.

The IPO marks one of Europe's biggest technology listings in recent times, behind Swedish music streaming service Spotify in April. Spotify's IPO was not a traditional IPO however and it decided to list in New York.

Europe's technology scene has been growing in recent years with a number of "unicorns" or companies with $1 billion valuations minted in recent years, particularly in the financial technology space. Swedish payments firm Klarna and British peer-to-peer lending firm Funding Circle are two such companies, with the latter rumored to be going public later this year.

"Today's IPO on Amsterdam's Euronext exchange is a big day for the company, and for fintech startups reinventing the centuries-old financial services industry," Jan Hammer, partner at Index Ventures, Adyen's biggest shareholder, said in a blog post published Wednesday.