Profits Up More Than 130 percent In Klarna’s Half-Year Report

Klarna, the online payments firm based in Sweden, and one of the unicorns that came of age with a more than $1-billion valuation, posted results Friday detailing growth for the first half of the year.

The company said that net profit came in at 228 million crowns, or about $28.4 million, up 138 percent year over year, on sales of 2.05 billion crowns.  Sales were up 21 percent.    

Klarna, as Reuters reported, traces its genesis back 12 years, and has been backed by a number of investors, including Sequoia Capital.  The latest valuation was at the end of 2015, when that number came in at $2.5 billion, according to the newswire.  The company’s operations extend across 18 countries.

In an e-mail sent to the newswire, Klarna spokeswoman Aoife Houlihan stated that the company was “pleased with the continued strong growth trajectory across all markets, increased merchant base and increased volumes recorded.” 

In recent news surrounding the company, Klarna said earlier this month that it had debuted Wavy, a free peer-to-peer payments service that operates across 31 European markets.  Through that service, customers can send euros to one another, connected by bank accounts or credit cards.  Elsewhere, Klarna also got a full banking license, via Finansinspektionen, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.  As it stands now, the company has 60 million customers and 70,000 merchants among its users.

Over the summer, Visa made a strategic investment in Klarna, with Bill Gajda, Visa’s senior vice president of strategic investments telling PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that the firm holds appeal because Klarna, Gajda said, is thinking like a bank that “they really represent, when we think about our own API capabilities, and focus on new token use cases … both a brand and a relationship, and also a platform where several different use case scenarios can be leveraged.  Gajda went on to say that “they’ve essentially built a pretty seamless marketplace that connects and protects consumers and merchants.”