Payments firm Adyen plans €9bn IPO
Thanks. We know it’s a story about an IPO.
Dutch payments firm Adyen has confirmed it’s planning an IPO with the listing of its shares on Euronext Amsterdam.
Adyen says the intended offering will consist of a private placement of existing shares held by the selling shareholders to institutional investors in various jurisdictions, including the Netherlands. This will give it a valuation of up to €9 billion.
The selling shareholders intend to sell approximately 15% of the company’s shares in the IPO.
Pieter van der Does, co-founder, president and CEO, says: “We feel that we are still in the early stages of a remarkable journey. Our focus remains on building new functionality and on helping our merchants grow. This offering provides us with the freedom to keep building the company, while offering our shareholders a path to liquidity.”
As part of its explanations, the firm cites its healthy financial status.
For the year ended 31 December 2017, Adyen says it generated net revenue of €218 million, representing 38% growth compared to 2016, and adjusted EBITDA of €99 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 45.5%.
There was more good news, when it said processed volumes increased to €108 billion in 2017 compared to €66 billion in 2016, representing year-on-year growth of 63%.
In February, eBay gave PayPal the boot and turned to Adyen as its primary processing partner.
Adyen’s customer base includes Uber, Netflix, Facebook, Spotify, Etsy and Vodafone.
Some of its famous backers include cyborg impersonator Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey (and Square of course).
As of 31 December 2017, the company had 668 employees globally, with its headquarters in Amsterdam, and 14 other offices in the US (San Francisco, New York), Latin America (Mexico City, Sao Paulo), Asia-Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai) and Europe (Paris, London, Manchester, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels and Madrid).
In 2017, Adyen obtained a banking licence in Europe, enabling the company to offer payment processing services with direct settlement of funds to merchants from an Adyen account “instead of having to rely on external banking partners”.
